Why It Sucks to Be a Shipwrecked Sailor in Edo Japan

In seventeen eighty-two a rice ship left the coast of Ise province with seventeen men aboard. A winter storm took its rudder. Ten years later three of them stood on Japanese soil again, in a country whose written law still said that a Japanese person who returned from abroad was to be put to death. Only two of the seventeen ever saw central Japan again. This is what actually happened to them. The ship that was built so that it could not turn back. The four gateways that stayed open the entire time Japan is supposed to have been sealed shut. The death sentence that stayed on the books for two hundred years and was not used. And the eleven volumes of intelligence that one survivor was kept in Edo to write. Episode 1 of EDO LIVES. The real lives behind old Japan. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 00:48 The Ship That Could Not Turn Back 02:20 The Current That Took You 03:41 The Shinshomaru 05:22 How Often This Happened 06:17 Japan Was Not a Closed Country 08:07 The Law That Said Death 08:54 Amchitka to St Petersburg 10:38 Two Men Out of Seventeen 11:38 Processed, Not Welcomed 13:16 Eleven Volumes About Russia 14:33 Not a Prisoner. Retained. 16:44 The Hojunmaru 17:30 Fired On By Their Own Country 19:34 The Policy Collapses 21:39 What the Archives Still Hold ABOUT THIS CHANNEL EDO LIVES follows one person through one job, in the Japan of the shoguns. Researched from Japanese language sources and primary records. New episode most Saturdays. This video uses AI narration and AI generated illustration. The research, the script and the editorial choices are human. #japanesehistory #edoperiod #history