Any person who leaves
the country to go to another
and later returns
will be put to death.
This was the law in Japan in the early 1800s. When fourteen-year-old
Manjiro, working on a fishing boat to help support his family, was
shipwrecked three hundred miles away from his homeland, he was
heartbroken to think that he would never again be able to go home. So
when an American whaling boat rescued him, Manjiro decided to do what no
other Japanese person had ever done: He went to America, where he
received an education and took part in events that eventually made him a
hero in the Land of the Rising Sun.