At this time, Japan was a closed country. The American ship or any non-Japanese ship could not enter Japan. Also, any Japanese who left Japan were killed by the Japanese government if they returned to Japan. Most of the people saved from the island were taken to Hawaii. The captain of the ship liked John Manjiro and took Manjiro with him. Manjiro saw a map of the world for the first time and saw how small Japan was in the world. Manjiro was named “John Mung” by the captain. He was adopted by the captain of the ship and lived with the captain’s family in the United States.
Manjiro learned English, math, measurement, navigation, and shipbuilding at school. He spent all of his time to studying to be a captain. He learned new ideas from the Western world. For example, democracy and equality between men and women.
Manjiro returned to Hawaii and bought a boat. He and his friends from the fishing boat started to sail back to Japan in December of 1850. Japan was still a closed country. Because of this, he was investigated by the Shogunate (the rulers of Japan) for a long time.
IN 1851, Manjiro return to his village in Japan.
Around this time, Shimazu Nariakira, a historical person in Japan, was interested in English and shipbuilding. John Manjiro began working as an English teacher. He had a strong friendship with many statesmen. He was even asked to be a statesman himself.
In 1853-1854, Manjiro was the interpreter for Matthew C. Perry when the Americans first came to Japan.
In his later years, Manjiro visited American friends. By then, he could not speak English very well any more. He died in 1898 at the age of 71 years old.
John Manjiro was actually born as Manjiro (without a family name). The name "John" comes from the name of the ship he was saved by when on the island in 1841. The name of the ship was "John Howland." The captain gave Manjiro this name. In 1938, Ibuse Masuji, a Japanese writer, first used the name "John Manjiro." From this book came the name of "John Manjiro."
Manjiro had problems translating because he was not good at translating English sentences. This was because he had not learned basic grammar when he was young. He was used as interpreter when Commodore Perry came in 1863. Manjiro pronounced English just as he heard it. His pronunciation was different from present-day English. Japanese based their pronunciation of English at the time on Manjiro’s pronunciation. They were able to be understood by Americans and English people.
There is a musical about Manjiro in Japan. It is called "The Dream of John Manjiro". It was first done in June, 1974.
John Manjiro was the first Japanese man to set foot on the contintental United States, to take a train, to ride a steamship, and to wear a necktie. John Manjiro talked about world views with Ryoma Sakamoto, a famous Japanese statesman and general.
Proper motion
Proper motion is the name for the way the stars seem to slowly move "relative to each other" when seen from Earth.
The movement is caused by the fact that all stars (including the Sun) are moving through space at hundreds of kilometres per second. However, because they are so far away, it takes a long time for us to see that they have moved, and even then it takes a powerful telescope to see the difference. Because of this, for a long time, most people thought that the stars did not move at all. Even the ancient Greeks, who knew a lot about the stars and discovered some of the other ways they move, such as stellar precession, did not discover proper motion (although they probably suspected it).
Proper motion was not proved to exist until 1718 when Edmond Halley noticed the stars Sirius, Arcturus and Aldebaran had moved from the places they were in star charts that Hipparchus had drawn around 130 BC. However, even after more than 1,800 years, they had moved less than half a degree.
Proper motion is useful to astronomers in figuring out how far away a star is from Earth because stars that are close usually have a larger proper motion (meaning they move faster across the sky) than stars that are farther away. For example, Barnard's star has the largest proper motion of any star, moving 10.3 arcseconds per year. This is equal to one quarter of a degree, or half the diameter of the Moon in the sky, in only 87 years. It is the second-closest star to the Earth at 5.98 light years away. Also, eight of the ten stars with the biggest proper motions are less than 15 light years away.
Origin of birds
The origin of birds is one of the most interesting questions in palaeontology and evolution. Birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era.
Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog"), who was a comparative anatomist, made a study of this nearly 150 years ago. He compared the first fossil bird, "Archaeopteryx", with a small theropod dinosaur, "Compsognathus". They are two fossils from the same place and time: the Solnhofen limestone in Bavaria, Germany. The strata come from the end of the Jurassic period, about 144 million years ago.
Huxley's papers on "Archaeopteryx", and the origin of birds, were of great interest then, and still are. He showed that the two fossils were almost identical, except for the front limbs and feathers of "Archaeopteryx".
He united reptiles and birds under the title of Sauropsida, and thought that birds had evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs.
All palaeontologists since Huxley agreed that "Archaeopteryx" evolved from reptiles, but many thought it was derived from an earlier type than dinosaurs. It took a long time before they agreed with Huxley. Almost all now think that early members of a group of small carnivorous dinosaur were ancestral to birds.
The group most favoured as ancestral is the Paraves or Eumaniraptora, which includes the dromaeosaurs and the troodonts. The dromaeosaurs include "Velociraptor" and "Deinonychus" but, of course, it would have been an earlier type of dromaeosaur, perhaps from the lower Jurassic. Dromaeosaurs have several traits we used to think were special to birds: hollow bones with holes for air-sacs, limbs with many bones either lost or fused, clavicles fused into wishbones, and feathers.
The discovery of feathered dinosaurs and birds in the Lower Cretaceous of China was what finally convinced palaeontologists. What seems to have happened is this. Theropod dinosaurs evolved feathers for heat regulation rather than flight. From then, a small group began to use them for primitive flight. This group is represented in the Jurassic by "Archaeopteryx" and "Anchiornis".
Huxley had pointed out that "Archaeopteryx" was a mixture of reptile and bird features. Without the feathers and arms, its skeleton looked just like that of "Compsognathus". We now know its bone growth physiology was much slower than modern birds, and more like that of its dinosaur ancestors. This means it would take longer after hatching before it could fly. A modern precocial bird takes for 3–6 weeks from hatching to flying. In "Archaeopteryx" this milestone might have taken about 18 weeks. It might have taken two to three years to reach its final adult size. The evolution of the physiology of modern forms occurred later in the group's history. They have had over 140 million years to evolve after "Archaeopteryx". This is an example of mosaic evolution, where some characters in a transitional form are basal, while others are remarkably advanced.
"Anchiornis huxlei" is so far the only dinobird fossil known which lived before "Archaeopteryx". It was found in Liaoning, China. The strata dates to the mid-late Jurassic period, 160 to 155 million years ago. There are also feather-bearing non-flying dinosaurs from the Jurassic of China, such as the maniraptoran "Epidexipteryx". "Epidexipteryx" is the earliest known example of ornamental feathers in the fossil record, about 152 to 168 million years ago.