Facing Both East and West : Descendants of American, European Settlers Find Island of Acceptance Among Japanese

Moses Savory is not your typical Japanese fisherman.

He grew up harvesting the abundant reefs around the Ogasawara Islands and knows these waters like few other men. A Japanese citizen who attended only Japanese schools, his gestures and speech are pure Japanese. But he has always looked as different as his name sounds.

Savory inherited a square jaw, a ruddy complexion and a rather prominent nose from his great-grandfather, Nathaniel Savory, the Massachusetts whaler and adventurer who led the first settlers to these remote islands in the western Pacific, 600 miles south of Tokyo.

He looked different enough that during World War II, in the intolerant mood of those times, people derisively called him keto --”hairy barbarian.” The military police harassed him as a suspected spy because he spoke English to his kinsmen, or mixed it with Japanese in the local pidgin. Wartime prejudice barred him from finding a wife on the island where his family had thrived for more than a century.

Yet Savory adapted and endured--and stayed. Today, at 77, he is a respected elder in a small and unique community of Japanese with American and European ancestry.

“I had some terrible experiences during the war,” Savory said in his native Japanese, which he prefers to English. “But I’m content now. This is my home. This is where I’m from.”

Japan is a country with few minorities. A stubborn aversion to ethnic diversity on the main islands has prevented generations of Korean and Chinese residents from assimilating fully. And Westerners who have put down roots in cosmopolitan cities like Yokohama and Kobe or even Tokyo must resign themselves to being emotionally quarantined as gaijin (foreigners) in perpetuity.

But an accident of history has seen Ogasawara’s Western “barbarians” integrated meaningfully into rural village life. They were here first, after all. When patriarch Nathaniel Savory charted his course across the Pacific in 1830 with a mixed crew of 31 Americans, Europeans and Hawaiians, the subtropical islands were empty.

Indeed, scholars think their original name, the Bonin Islands, derived from bunin , an archaic Japanese word for “uninhabited” that apparently was marked on early maps.

Japanese who migrated to the islands under claim of sovereignty in the latter half of the 19th Century classified the Savorys, the Webbs, the Gilleys and the other Western clans as zairai tomin-- “native islanders.” They came with the territory, which Japan considered its own because a seafaring feudal lord named Sadayori Ogasawara “discovered” the islands in 1593, half a century after the Spanish explorer Francisco de Villalobas first touched ashore.

The Civil War-era American government looked the other way, Victorian England abandoned its tentative claim, and Japanese settlers soon took control.

The accident repeated itself in 1946, when occupying U.S. naval forces built a base on Chichijima, the administrative center of the Bonins and the Volcano chain--which includes the notorious World War II killing grounds of Iwo Jima to the south.

Ogasawara’s civilian population had been evacuated in anticipation of an American assault, which never came. After Japan’s surrender, the U.S. military sealed off the chain, except to a group of about 130 islanders--people of Western heritage and their families. Thousands of ethnic Japanese were not permitted back until 1968, when the islands reverted to Tokyo’s rule.

Savory, who returned from Yokohama in 1946 with a new Japanese bride, was classified like the others as an “enemy national” by the U.S. Navy. Still, the Navy shipped his fish to market in Guam and gave him odd jobs around the base for $3 a day.

Even that ambivalent status brought relief after years of repression under militarist Japan. Nearly 50 years later, Savory softens his bitter wartime memories with wry humor.

“They accused me of being a spy, but if I had the brains to be a spy, I wouldn’t have been on an island like this,” he said. “I would have been in a much bigger place.”

Savory’s four daughters attended high school in Guam and all have immigrated to the United States, a pattern that is not unusual among Ogasawara’s fifth-generation zairai tomin, considering the limited economic opportunities here.

This cluster of 103 islands, four of which are inhabited, has no airport. The only regular transportation linking Chichijima to the outside world is a 3,500-ton passenger ship that sails about once a week and takes 28 hours to reach Tokyo--at a cost of $350 round-trip, in steerage. One in every three jobs in Ogasawara is in civil service, mostly in the Tokyo Metropolitan government, which subsidizes as well as administers the islands.

Even though nearly all of Bonin’s zairai tomin consider themselves Japanese, some greatly emphasize their Western roots. One of Moses Savory’s second cousins, Jerry, 76, boasts of sending his three sons to the United States after the islands reverted to Japan 23 years ago.

“The Savory clan has returned to the U.S.,” he said. “I’m very proud of that. The Savory name is back.”

Jerry Savory was attending St. Joseph’s College in Yokohama when he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army under his naturalized name, Yoshinao Sebori. He read English books in secret to keep his language skills from getting rusty. During the U.S. Navy’s rule over the Bonins, he was one of the island’s two civilian health care workers. When Japanese administrators regained control of Ogasawara in 1968, he changed his legal name to Jerry Savory out of spite.

“I’m a Japanese, but my feeling is different--America is my mother country,” Savory, who runs an inn called Silver Moon, said in halting English. “I worked very hard not to lose my ancestors’ language. They brought it here and left it to us, and we should respect that.”

Making the abrupt switch from English-language schools under the Navy to compulsory Japanese education was a traumatic one for many Bonin youth.

Consider Johnson Washington, 42, son of Joji Washington and great-grandson of a Portuguese-African cabin boy who deserted his whaling ship during a port call at Chichijima, then known as Peel Island, in 1843. Washington did all his schooling in English and had to teach himself how to read and write Japanese.

“For the first five years it was really bad. We still thought in English; we dreamed in English,” said Washington, who works at a marine research center. “I’m doing OK now, but it’s still a struggle to write those Chinese characters.”

No one seems to know exactly how many descendants of the zairai tomin remain on the island, but the number may be near the 200 who lived here at the time of reversion. Generations of intermarriage with Japanese, meanwhile, have softened Western features so that many blend in physically with their neighbors from the interior.

The population of Chichijima and nearby Hahajima, the other main island in the chain, totals about 2,000, and about two-thirds of the inhabitants are shin tomin , or “new islanders,” who wandered this way over the past two decades. These people came in pursuit of Ogasawara’s pristine environment and Florida-latitude climate, and they form the backbone of a fledging tourist industry.

The rest are so-called kyu tomin , “old islanders”--ethnically pure Japanese with pre-war roots. They dominate local politics, run the construction industry and have the greatest clout with the administrators from Tokyo. Even today, kyu tomin are given priority in obtaining public housing, a fact that can irritate some with the “wrong” pedigree.

“I don’t want to call it discrimination, but we’ve had to deal with a lot of problems,” Washington said. “But on a small island like this, you can’t focus on the differences if you’re going to get along. We depend on each other, so nobody tries to make a big deal about our backgrounds.”

Kunio (Ping) Uebu, 70, the descendant of a British sailor named Webb who found his way to Nathaniel Savory’s Pacific paradise in the mid-19th Century, scoffs at questions about his family roots.

“Don’t ask me about my ancestors, because they don’t have anything to do with my life,” said Uebu, a white-haired fisherman with craggy eyebrows who lost an arm fighting for the Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria. “I don’t have any interest at all in the past.”

Yet for Takashi (Jonathan) Savory, 33, one of Moses Savory’s nephews, genealogy has become an obsession. A bureaucrat at the Ogasawara Village Office, he has visited Massachusetts twice over the past two years to explore the Essex County origins of Nathaniel Savory, his great-great-grandfather. In March, he succeeded in tracking down the American branch of the Savory family and held a reunion with about 50 relatives.

He plans another reunion this year, this one including uncles and cousins from Ogasawara and their offspring in America.

“My mother is Japanese, my wife is Japanese, and my children speak no English at all,” Savory said. “As the blood ties get thinner and thinner, I decided it was important to research our heritage. I want my children to know where we came from.”

Bonin’s “native islanders” all received Japanese citizenship in 1882, eight years after Nathaniel Savory died at the age of 80, and their story since then has been one of adaptability and resilience.

After the American whaling industry died out with the switch to fossil fuels, Bonin men shipped out on seal hunting expeditions and fished the island waters in outrigger canoes while Japanese settlers tilled the volcanic soil. The Ogasawara Yankees ate traditional chicken dinners on the Fourth of July.

Moses Savory recalls how his grandfather, Horace Perry Savory, forbade the speaking of Japanese in his home, even though the children studied in Japanese at school. Moses’ own daughters studied in English in school and spoke Japanese at home.

During World War II, Jerry Savory’s older brother, Fred, painted “YANKEE TOWN” in bold letters on the rooftops in Okumura, the quarter where many of the zairai tomin lived. American planes pummeled the island with bombs but spared the neighborhood until the final days of the war.

During 23 years of U.S. occupation rule, the Navy refused to let the islanders move back into Yankee Town.

“They said, ‘You’re Japanese, and this is an occupation,’ ” Moses Savory said. “What choice did we have but to go along with them?”

After reversion, the Yankees went to great pains to adopt a low profile. Many took on Japanese names. Washington became Kimura, Savory became Sebori or Okumura, Webb became Uebu or Uwabu. People took a chameleon approach to survival.

“When the Navy was here, we picked up American gestures and patterns of speech, but when the Japanese returned our gestures and even our faces started looking more Japanese,” said Aisaku Ogasawara, who before 1968 went by the name Isaac Gonzoles.

“But there is no feeling that we’re foreigners on our own island,” said Ogasawara, pastor of St. George’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1909. “Our faces may be different, but inside we are Japanese.”