At Cape Ashizuri, near the lighthouse, is a statue of local hero Nakahama Manjiro, aka John Mung. In 1841, when Nakahama was 14 and working on a fishing boat, he was marooned on an island off Japan and picked up by a US whaling ship, which took him to Honolulu, then New Bedford. He studied English, math, and navigation, traveled the world, and returned to Japan in 1851, where he became a teacher and an interpreter for the Tokyo government – quite an adventure for a boy from a poor rural village.