Japan-Nantucket (Rashomon): THE TRAILER

“How Much Can You Change What You Are, To Preserve What You Have Been?”

Sit back, open your mind, and get ready for ... Japan-Nantucket (Rashomon)

In this season of the podcast, we will explore one aspect of the “Nantucket diaspora” by tracing three journeys:

Islanders who built careers commanding Japanese-owned steamships and resided in Japan for decades. While they tried to maintain their former lives in western enclaves, their brief return visits to the Island revealed how different they had become. 

Three young Japanese girls making the reverse journey, from Japan to America. Not as immigrants, but students, mandated to return and help transform their once-closed nation into a modern industrial state. Like our Captains, the girls were changed by the experience and after their return struggled to remain  “Japanese” in a nation balance tradition against the existential need to become a global power.

Americans who went to Japan not to make their fortune, but to acquire and preserve its material past before it was swept away by the modern age. They quickly discovered that the decision of what to acquire, and whose opinion to follow, altered the definition of what was  “authentic”. And their immersion in a culture they were just beginning to comprehend altered their sense of what was authentic in their own lives.

Three books, will be our guideposts for these journeys:

1.         Barons of the Sea, by Steven UIjifusa

2.         Daughters of the Samurai, by Janice Namura

3.         The Great Wave, by Steven Benfey

This is a production of the Nantucket Atheneum.