This monument commemorates Ranald MacDonald, Japan's first English teacher and a founding father of Japanese modernization. Listening to this title, the Japanese give this teacher a really high hat, but his experience in Japan can be described as twisted and legendary. Ranald MacDonald was born in 1824 in Astoria, Oregon, in what is today the United States of America, and as an adult was apprenticed to a bank in Canada. He learned by chance of his mixed Indian ancestry, and firmly believed that the Japanese were the ancestors of the North American Indians, so he began to learn the Japanese language. 1845, MacDonald quit his job at the bank, and worked for several years as a navigator and harpooner on a whaling ship in New England. 1848, by chance, the whaling ship entered the northern waters of Japan to operate, and when the ship was close to the island of Rishiri, he immediately decided to take a small boat to leave the whaling ship. When the whaler approached Rishiri Island, he immediately decided to leave the whaler in a small boat and row to land. Unbeknownst to him, Japan was in the midst of the Edo period and had been isolated from the rest of the world for 200 years. The Shogun had banned foreign travel and trade, allowing only limited trade with China and Holland in the port of Nagasaki, and foreigners were forbidden to enter Japan privately. Upon MacDonald's arrival on the island of Rishiri, he was seized by the local Ainu. Explaining that he had been shipwrecked and intended to be peaceful, the Ainu accepted his explanation, placed him under house arrest and transported him to the seat of government in Nagasaki. Coincidentally, the Tokugawa Shogunate was worried about finding trained English interpreters, so he was appointed as a tutor to 14 Japanese interpreters, teaching them mainly conversational English and pronunciation. Of course since MacDonald was considered a criminal who had entered Japan illegally, their Japanese-English language exchanges took place through the bars of the prison, and this was the first time that the Japanese received face-to-face practical English education. In 1853, in the famous “Black Ship Attack,” Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the U.S. Navy's East India Fleet arrived in Japan and asked the Shogunate to open its doors to the United States. Einosuke Moriyama was the chief interpreter of the Japanese negotiating delegation at the time, and was praised by the Japanese government for his “fluent English,” and played an active role in negotiations such as the Conference on the Treaty of Commerce. Einosuke Moriyama was one of the 14 people McDonald was teaching at the time.