As previously described, it was in 1889, while studying medicine at Yale University, that the young Japanese Shiukichi Shigemi was inspired to write A Japanese Boy. He may, as mentioned, have been influenced by the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. A more immediate model was Yan Phou Lee’s memoir When I Was a Boy in China. Published in 1887, it told the story of the author’s childhood, with chapters on school life, religion, games and holidays in China.
Whichever the case, Shigemi’s volume starts with a prefatory letter addressed to Henry W. Farnham, a professor of economics at Yale, whom the author credits with inspiring him to put together his memoir. Modestly disclaiming the work as a “jejune little volume,” the introduction expresses Shigemi’s twofold goal in writing the work: His most important goal was confessedly to make money for his studies. Yet he also affirmed, “There seems to be no story told in this country of the Japanese boy’s life by a Japanese boy himself,” and so made it his business to write an “indiscreet juvenile publication.”
While the author expressed fears (whether sincere or conventional) that his English would be inadequate, he also sought to establish his authorship to a white audience, which might be expected to doubt the book’s authenticity on account of its well-crafted prose. Thus, taking a leaf from American slave narratives such as that of Frederick Douglass, he declared its authorship with the phrase “Written by himself.”
The text of A Japanese Boy is made up of 14 short chapters. The first chapter offers an account of his hometown of Imbari and its role in the rice trade.
“When a junk comes in laden with rice, commission merchants get on board and strike for bargains. The capacity of the vessel is measured by the amount of rice it can carry. The grain merchant carries about him a good-sized bamboo a few inches long, one end of which is sharpened and the other closed, being cut just at a joint. He thrusts the pointed end into bags of the rice.”
Chapter 2 discusses the author’s school and his schoolmaster. He mentions how cold the school buildings were: “Such a building is a poor place to hold a school in, but the boys were used to it and they behaved so--quarreling, weeping, laughing, shrieking--that there was little time left for them to feel the cold in their young warm blood.”
Chapter 3 discusses the kitchen and Japanese food. In it he included some social commentary about the Japanese family and the place of daughters-in-law.
“It is this that renders a young married woman’s lot in life very hard in Japan, the principal weight of daily work devolving upon her. After all this, if parents-in-law are not pleased with her she is in imminent danger of being turned off like a hired servant, however affectionate she may be toward her husband; and the husband feels it his duty to part with her despite his deep attachment; so sacred is regarded the manifestation of filial piety!”
Chapter 4 covered games and punishments at school, while chapter 5 was centered on Japanese baths as well as Japanese dancing and music. In Chapter 6 the author described Japanese theatre culture and told the stories of various actors and actresses he had known.
“We have known a young actor, whose boyhood was spent in Imabari, make a mark in representing female characters. He copied the grace and deportment of the fair sex archly.…At any rate, his manners were thoroughly feminine, and his womanly way of speaking a woman herself could not imitate. Our friend is now gone to a metropolis, where he is winning his way into the hearts of the millions.”
Chapter 7 covered wrestlers and story-tellers, while chapter 8 discussed fishing. Later chapters were devoted largely to descriptions of Japanese holidays, such as New Year’s mochi making or Boy’s Day or Obon.
The book’s conclusion is rather odd. After further discussion of his school days, the author states that he was forced to leave school once his father’s business failed. He then abruptly closes his tale, as if narrating his life was too painful:
“I might go on telling all about the period of my apprenticeship, and things I learned and people I observed during that time: how I finally carried the day and returned to my studies; how I studied Chinese and how I struck out in English; how I went to Kioto and struggled through five years’ academic training; and how a few years ago I borrowed money and sailed for America. But that would be writing a real autobiography, which would be disagreeable to me as well as distasteful to the reader…But I have written enough to try the patience of my indulgent reader, and I myself have grown weary of my own performance; it is therefore excusable, I hope, to draw this narrative abruptly to anend.”
A Japanese Boy was widely, and mostly positively, reviewed in the newspaper and periodical press. However, the chapters and aspects emphasized by the different reviewers were so distinct as to bear examination.
A critic in The Nation, displaying knowledge of Japanese language and customs, underlined the charm inherent in a description of Japanese society by an observer from the common people:
The charm of this unassuming little book is its utter freedom from anything stilted or pretentious. It is noticeable that though the author is not of the old samurai (or gentry) class, but the son of a merchant, it never occurs to him to pass himself for anything else than what he is. In other words, be realizes fully that the day of democracy has come to Japan–as well as that Americans have slight regard for mere rank or pretensions that have no basis in personal merit.… His command of a vocabulary at once copious and exact is extraordinary, and is even better attained, we imagine, by an alien who has mastered English by long and patient book translation than by a native.
The American magazine similarly underlined the everyday life the author described:
Under this laconic title Mr. Shiukichi Shegemi, a Japanese student in Yale University, gives us a description of his own boyhood, with incidental notices of national customs, superstitions, and social usages in the Island Empire. Mr. Shigemi’s English is fluent and accurate, but the book makes no pretenses to literary graces or word-painting of any sort.
The writer in the journal The Critic enjoyed the book’s humor, which it saw as a subtle satire on American customs:
Full of fun and sparkle, with now and then a sly hit at American follies, Mr. Shigemi’s pages are very readable, and crackle with wit. He makes the rosy-cheeked sisters, the father, who was a kind of Isaak Walton, and the unselfish, patient mother very real; while, without argument, he shows the heart of humanity in Dai Nihon to be much the same as on the Atlantic coast.
The New Englander and Yale Review extolled the author’s gumption in dramatizing his home culture to foreigners, and earning money for his education in the process:
Mr. Shigemi…has succeeded in making the whole Japanese daily life—and especially family life—pass before his readers in a thoroughly attractive and entertaining manner… If any of our Anglo-Saxon boys shall display half the enterprise and pluck which this “Japanese boy” has shown, in fighting his way in the world, they may consider their success assured.
Perhaps the most notable report on he book came from the famed novelist William Dean Howells, who discussed the book in Harpers magazine. Howells presented the book as a model of universalism, and a fitting answer to ethnocentrism (historian Jonathan Daigle argued that Howells’s arguments resembled anthropologist Franz Boas’s attacks on biological racism:
We wish to make Shinkichi Shigemi… our compliment on the excellent simplicity with which he has told the story of his child life in the little seaport of Imabari; and we can cordially commend it to the youth of our schools, our colleges, our newspapers, our magazines, our pulpits, for that virtue. It in really very delightful, that simplicity; and we hope Shinkichi Shigemi will not lose it, when he is able to free his English of all color of a foreign idiom.
He tells us of his schools, tasks, plays, punishments; his home life, in kitchen and village life outside; the theatres, the manners and customs of the people; his relations and neighbors; the family sports and amusements; the holidays, and the religious rites and feasts. It is all very queer, outwardly; but inwardly the life is like our own, with the same affections, the same emotions, the same ambitions, the same ideals of rectitude and kindness and purity.
We value the book not only for the pleasure, the sincere and graphic life-pictures given in it, but for the contribution to man’s knowledge of himself it makes. It will help to clear away the delusion that the quality, the essence of human nature is varied by condition, or creed, or climate, or color; and to teach the truth of our solidarity which we are so long a-learning.
The daily press was much less prolix and intriguing in its commentary on the book. The New York Times reported, “The book is bright and interesting, and it gives a good insight into the home life of the Japanese.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s assessment was similarly reserved:
[Shigemi] has done his work very well, for aside from the stilted introduction, it is a naive record of customs and sports so entirely Oriental that it will have great attraction for the American reader… The book is more complete than Yan Phou Lee’s When I Was a Boy, although it is not so well written.
A Japanese Boy has enjoyed a new birth of popularity in recent years. New American editions and a German translation been published, and there has been an audiobook version. It remains a readable and charming portrait of Meiji-era Japan. It also carries a historical legacy, in helping introduce literature on childhood as an important genre in Asian American writing.
© 2025 Greg Robinson
