Nowadays teaching English in Japan is a tried and true vehicle of expat life, but that wasn’t always the case. The profession didn’t really exist in its present form until the asset price bubble of the late 1980s, when a condo building in Ginza was worth more than several African nations and Japanese people were practically dumping money on all the white guys they could find. Of course, the Japanese had wanted to study English back before the Bubble too. Way, way back in fact – all the way back to the 1848 arrival of one anachronistically named Ranald MacDonald, the very first English teacher in Japan.

To do MacDonald’s story justice I need to start with two points:

– Japan wasn’t really a place you could just “go”. Between 1633 and 1853 it was the most isolated country in the world, North Korea’s nineteenth century analogue. Japanese who attempted to leave and foreigners who tried to enter could be put to death. There were some trade concessions to the Chinese, Koreans and Dutch, but they were limited to certain ports and were almost never allowed inland.

- Ranald MacDonald may, in fact, have been the single least likely person on the planet to end up teaching in Japan. He was born in the first American settlement on the west coast thirteen years after it was founded and only thirty years after anyone bothered to explore the area. Fort Astoria was a tiny trading post in the middle of hundreds upon hundreds of miles of Pacific wilderness, in a time when the area didn’t belong to anybody but competing merchant companies. His mother, Raven (or Princess Sunday, whichever sounds less like a Disney movie), was the daughter of a powerful Chinook leader. His father, Archibald, was a Scottish fur trader who’d been living in the wilds of America since he was 23.

When MacDonald was nine or ten, three Japanese fishermen wound up in Oregon after being caught in a storm (hilariously enough, they’d only meant to go 150 miles up the coast of Japan. oops). The men left such an impact on MacDonald that he resolved to get to Japan any way he could, despite the threat of death by Japanese authorities. After a few years in higher education and a lame stint as a bank clerk, he threw his arms up, said “screw this place” and left to sail the world.

MacDonald eventually convinced a whaling ship to drop him off the coast of Japan in a rowboat, washing up on an island off Hokkaido and claiming he was shipwrecked. The government sent him to Nagasaki, the only remotely international city in Japan, where he was imprisoned in a temple for safekeeping (he raved about Japanese hospitality for the rest of his life, no joke). Being an educated man he took to teaching English and western geography to upper-class samurai who had experience with the Dutch. One of his students was the genius Einosuke Moriyama, who would later act as interpreter to Matthew Perry‘s efforts to open the country.

MacDonald was in Japan for less than a year before being “rescued” by an American navy sloop, spending the next decade or so traveling the world before settling in British Columbia. He died in the arms of his neice on August 24th, 1894.

Ranald MacDonald’s last words were, “Sayonara, my dear, sayonara…”