Ranald MacDonald (February 3, 1824 – August 24, 1894) was the first native English-speaker to teach the English language in Japan, including educating Einosuke Moriyama, one of the chief interpreters to handle the negotiations between Commodore Perry and the Tokugawa Shogunate.

[2] Around 1825, Archibald McDonald married Jane Klyne, a Métis woman from Canada, and brought Ranald to Fort Vancouver, the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Based on the popular historical fiction of Eva Emery Dye, it has been repeated that "as a child of eight in 1832 at Fort Vancouver,[3] he met three shipwrecked Japanese sailors, including Otokichi".

In reality the three shipwrecked Japanese sailors were brought to Fort Vancouver in July 1834 [not 1832], arriving there about four months after 10-yr-old Ranald MacDonald had departed for the Red River Colony – so there never was the fabled "meeting of East and West".

MacDonald stayed in confinement, at Daihian,[7] a branch temple of the Sofuku-ji in Nagasaki, for 7 months, during which he also studied Japanese before being taken aboard a passing American warship.

In April 1849, in Nagasaki, MacDonald was remitted together with fifteen shipwreck survivors to captain James Glynn on the American warship USS Preble which had been sent to rescue stranded sailors.

After travelling widely, MacDonald returned to Canada East (now Quebec) and, in 1858, went to the new colony of British Columbia where he set up a packing business in the Fraser River gold fields and later in the Cariboo, in 1864.

Some of the people who won this award are: Frederik L. Schodt (2016), Zia Haider Rahman (2016), Hajime Narukawa (2017), Bruno Maçães (2018) and the FENIX Landverhuizersmuseum in Rotterdam (2019).