The Reverend Jonathan Scobie was an American Baptist

Baptist

Baptists comprise a group of Christian denominations and churches that subscribe to a doctrine that baptism should be performed only for professing believers , and that it must be done by immersion...

 minister and missionary in Yokohama

Yokohama

is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu...

, Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. It is said that around 1869, he built the first rickshaw to transport his invalid wife around the city. However, there are numerous other theories about the origin of the rickshaw, as explained in History of the Rickshaw.

Name

His name is listed variously as Jonathan Scobie, E. Jonathan Scobie and Jonathan Goble.