SS City of Tokio

On her maiden voyage in February 1875, City of Tokio's sister ship City of Peking lost propeller blades, and also required the replacement of 5,000 rivets, amounting to a total repair bill of $300,000. When City of Tokio made her own maiden voyage in April of the same year, she too suffered the loss of propeller blades.[6]

The problems were eventually diagnosed as improper loading of the ships combined with weak wooden decks. The wooden decks on both vessels were subsequently replaced by iron, after which both established an enviable record of reliability.[6]

Like her sister ship City of Peking, City of Tokio was utilized exclusively on the Far Eastern steam packet service, operating from the Port of San Francisco to Yokohama, Japan and Hong Kong. Both vessels transported Chinese, and later Japanese, migrants to the United States, as well as exporting foodstuffs and manufactured goods and importing a range of goods including silk, tea, hemp, spices and opium.[7]

In 1877, United States President Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a highly successful world tour, during which he was greeted at every port of call as the hero of the recently concluded Civil War.

Grant departed the United States on the first leg of his tour on May 17, 1877, on the American Line's Pennsylvania-class steamship Indiana. He returned home almost two and a half years later on board City of Tokio, arriving at San Francisco on September 20, 1879.

A contemporary account described the arrival thus:

A fleet of steamers and yachts met the City of Tokio down the bay, while guns boomed until the harbor was cloudy with smoke, bells rang, and factory whistles tooted and screamed. Every vantage point overlooking the channel was black with cheering crowds.

It was dusk when the General landed. A great procession was awaiting him, and escorted him, through streets draped with bunting and bright with thousands of lights and bonfires, to the Palace Hotel, where a chorus of five hundred voices sang an ode of greeting.[8]

Cheered by crowds at every station, Grant eventually reached Philadelphia, his original point of departure two and half years earlier, on December 12, 1879.[8]

After the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882,[9] American industrialists began to look elsewhere for reliable sources of cheap labor. The Japanese government had forbidden emigration since 1868, but in the 1880s it relaxed some of its restrictions.[10] In 1884, the government of Hawaii offered to subsidize the transport of Japanese labourers to its territory, and advertised a set of conditions under which the migrants would be employed on its sugar plantations.[11]

On February 8, 1885, the first group of 943 Japanese – 676 men, 159 women, and 108 children – arrived in Honolulu, on board City of Tokio. This group was the very first in the wave of immigration whose members would later be dubbed Issei, or first-generation Japanese migrants to the United States.[12][13]

City of Tokio's service was to end prematurely. In the early hours of 24 June 1885, in conditions of poor visibility, City of Tokio was grounded on rocks at the entrance to Tokyo Bay. At first it seemed as if the ship could be refloated, but the onset of a typhoon rendered salvage impossible, and the storm damaged the ship beyond repair. Fortunately, all of the passengers and some of the cargo were safely removed before the vessel foundered.[14]