Hikozō Hamada became the first Japanese American, a Christian, and Joseph Heco after a shipwreck.
September 20, 1837: Joseph Heco, the first Japanese person to be naturalized as a United States citizen and the first to publish a Japanese language newspaper, was born.
In late October 1850, a thirteen year old boy named Hikozō Hamada boarded a ship home from Edo. He had no way of knowing he would not set foot on Japanese soil again for nine years, or that he would spend most of that time becoming something no Japanese person had ever been: a citizen of the United States.
Hikozō had already lost both parents by then. His father, a local landowner in Harima province, died when he was young. His mother remarried a seaman, then died herself when Hikozō was twelve. It was his stepfather, often away at sea but devoted to the boy, who brought him along on that fateful trip.
The ship never made it home. A severe storm in the Pacific dismasted the vessel and left it drifting, out of control, for nearly fifty days. When the American freighter Auckland found the wreck roughly 500 miles off the Japanese coast, seventeen survivors were still aboard. Hikozō was one of them. In February 1851, the Auckland brought them to San Francisco.
A government caught between two impulses
What happened next reflected an America that hadn’t yet decided what to do with Japan, or with the Japanese. On one hand, US officials saw an opportunity: a chance to build goodwill by returning the castaways home. In 1852, the government sent Hikozō’s group toward Macao, where they were meant to join Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition, the same mission that would force open Japan’s ports the following year.
Hikozō never completed that journey. While the ship was delayed for repairs in Hong Kong, an American interpreter approached him with a different offer: come back to the United States, learn English properly, and one day return to Japan with skills that would actually matter.
Hikozō took the deal instead of the ride home. He never met Perry. He met his own future.
From shipyard worker to a senator’s secretary
Back in San Francisco by 1853, Hikozō found work at the shipyards before his language ability caught the attention of a local customs collector, Beverly Sanders, who offered him a job and a path to education.
Sanders eventually brought him to Baltimore, where Hikozō attended a Catholic school and was baptized under a new name: Joseph.
By 1857, Joseph Heco’s trajectory had accelerated further. California Senator William Gwin invited him to Washington, D.C. as his secretary, and through that connection Heco became the first unofficial Japanese person ever introduced to a sitting US president, Franklin Pierce. The following June, in 1858, Heco went further still. He became the first Japanese person ever naturalized as a citizen of the United States.
A castaway shakes the president’s hand
Heco spent the following years moving between two worlds, working as an interpreter in Japan for Townsend Harris, the first American consul there, then returning to the US in September 1861 after a business partnership fell apart.
It was during this stretch, on March 12, 1862, that Heco found himself introduced to President Abraham Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward.
Heco later described the moment in his own memoir: the president rising from his chair, extending, in Heco’s words, “a huge hand,” and saying he was glad to meet someone who had come from a place as far off as Japan.
It’s one of the only documented meetings between Lincoln and anyone of Japanese descent. When Lincoln was assassinated three years later, Heco wrote to Seward with his condolences.
Building the paper No one had built before
Heco eventually returned to Japan for good, arriving during a country in upheaval as the Tokugawa shogunate crumbled toward the Meiji Restoration. In 1864, he founded Kaigai Shimbun, the first Japanese-language newspaper, translating foreign news for a country that had spent over two centuries deliberately cut off from it.
The paper didn’t last. It folded after just ten issues, its circulation too small to sustain it. But the attempt itself was enough to earn Heco a title he still holds in Japan today: the father of Japanese journalism.
He spent his remaining decades in business, working for a time under Japan’s Finance Ministry, before settling in Kobe until illness slowed him in 1881. Joseph Heco died of a heart attack in Tokyo in 1897, at 60 years old, with no children to carry his name forward. He was buried in the foreigners’ section of Aoyama Cemetery.