Japan’s encounter with the modern world

At first glance, the origins of modern Japan seem to coincide conveniently with the dramatic arrival of US Commodore Perry in 1853. Before his arrival, Japan looked like a feudal monarchy that had been hiding in self-imposed isolation from the world for 250 years; within 50 years of his visit Japan had literally undergone a revolution – it had a modern, industrial economy, a constitutional government, and the beginnings of a colonial empire. To many commentators, this astonishingly rapid transformation was occasioned by Japan’s shocking encounter with the superior technology and power of the Western nations. In this version of the story, Perry broke traditional Japan and forced it into the modern world. However, as we will see in this chapter, the reality is not so simple.

The arrival of Perry

After the annexation of Texas in 1845, the war with Mexico, and finally the incorporation of California into the Union in September 1850 during the so-called ‘gold rush’, the USA was expanding westwards energetically. The imperial ambitions of the USA and its desire to compete with Great Britain for lucrative trade opportunities in Asia encouraged it to look even further west across the Pacific Ocean to Japan. In this spirit, the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry with his four fabled ‘black ships’ in July 1853 seemed like a natural step in the process.

Perry was famous in naval circles for his passion for modernization, and particularly steam-powered ships; even before he had made his first, famous trip to Japan in the USS Mississippi he had already earned the epithet ‘the father of the steam-navy’. It is not without significance, therefore, that it was

the presence of four black steam-ships that intimidated the local government officials in Uraga Bay (near Edo, present-day Tokyo) to take the unprecedented step of allowing Perry to come ashore and present a letter from US President Millard Fillmore. 

Until that time, an official policy of isolationism (sakoku) meant that foreigners had been forbidden from the mainland of Japan, with only a small number of Dutch traders permitted to stay on the tiny, artificial islet of Deshima near the outlying city of Nagasaki since 1641. The letter contained a series of demands for more open trade with Japan, and Perry left Uraga with the ominous promise to return the next year with a more substantial naval force, ready to force compliance if it was not forthcoming.

In fact, the USA was a later comer: European ships had been trying to crack open Japan for at least the previous 50 years. 

Russian vessels started to show interest in the northerly island of Hokkaido as early as 1792. Already developing a serious stake in China, the British sailed to Uraga Bay in 1818 to make a half-hearted request for the opening of trade relations, but their advances were rejected. In 1825, the shogunate government, or bakufu, became so concerned about the appearance of foreign vessels that it issued the order that coastal warlords should expel foreign advances by force if necessary, and in 1837 a US

merchant ship was shelled. Indeed, for the first 50 years of the 19th century, the bakufu really believed that it could keep the Western world out. It was not until an emissary of the Dutch King William III in 1844 tried to explain to the shogun that the world had changed since the expulsion of the Europeans in

the 17th century that the bakufu really started to rethink its place in the world. Comprehensive British victories over China in the so-called Opium Wars in 1842 seemed to prove the point.

If the British could humiliate the colossus of China so effectively, how could the smaller and more peripheral nation of Japan escape a similar fate? Lest they provoke serious military retaliation from the Western powers, the bakufu quickly rescinded its order to fire on foreign vessels. It was in this context that Perry first arrived in Uraga Bay.

When Perry returned with nine ships in February 1854, he found government officials willing to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa (31 March 1854). This treaty opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, and also provided for the stationing of the first US consul on mainland Japan; Townsend Harris would take up this post in Shimoda in July 1856. The Treaty of Kanagawa opened the floodgates, and the European imperial powers quickly secured similar deals: France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia all signed new treaties in the wake of Perry’s return. 

By 1858, the so-called Unequal Treaties regime was firmly in place: without a shot being fired, Japan found itself in a similar position to China after the Opium Wars (with the notable exception that the Western powers agreed to prohibit opium trade with Japan). Japan had lost control of its tariffs, had

opened its borders to trade and commerce with the West, and had even granted the privilege of extra-territoriality to the Western powers (which meant that foreign nationals were exempt from Japanese law even on Japanese soil). Rather than being justified by military defeat, however, these measures were imposed on Japan on the basis that it was not an equal member of international society – it was not a modern, industrial, constitutional polity. As we will see, this humiliation was itself a powerful force fuelling the development of a strong sense of nationalism in late 19th-century Japan, as well as a key factor driving the revolution to come. At all costs, Japan sought to end the Unequal Treaties.

It is important to note that it would be an exaggeration to argue that these humiliations damaged a coherent or pre-existing sense of national pride in Japan, since prior to the mid-19th century Japan was a relatively divided, fragmented, and non-centralized territory, knitted together by bonds of loyalty, military dependency, and religious imagery. Indeed, in many ways, the humiliation of the Unequal Treaties was fundamental in the process of creating a modern sense of national consciousness in Japan.

The significance of the modern, industrial power of Perry’s fleet in these events should not be underestimated. Indeed, the image of the ‘black ships’ quickly became iconic in Japan, representing

the menace of Western power as well as the threat of traditional Japan being overcome by the cultural and technological force of modernity. An intriguing anecdote concerning Perry’s return to Japan in 1854 illustrates this point: contemporary accounts describe the way in which the Japanese officials arranged for a sumo contest to be staged for the American officers, presumably in an attempt to intimidate the foreigners with the power and martial spirit of the Japanese. However, the US delegation is reported to have been singularly unimpressed by the spectacle, finding the performance laughable. For their part, the US delegation assembled a 100-metre circle of track and made a gift of a quarter-scale steam locomotive for the Japanese officials to ride. It is a testament to the astonishing impact of industrial technology that this toy train was far more intimidating than the primal power of sumo wrestling.

Perry had probably been aware of the effect that his black ships and his little locomotive would have. Before embarking on his mission, Perry had read much of the available literature about Tokugawa Japan, and he is even thought to have consulted with the famous Japanologist, Philipp Franz von
Siebold, who had lived in the Dutch enclave on Deshima for eight years before returning to Leiden in the Netherlands.
Nonetheless, information on the secretive and isolationist nation was scarce. Only a tiny number of Westerners had any first-hand knowledge of Japan, and even those who did (like Siebold himself )
had only limited exposure to the real social and political circumstances of the unfamiliar land. Orientalism was rife; the romance of the ‘mystical East’ coloured most accounts. Western
accounts of Japan in the early 19th century portrayed it as a feudal kingdom, untouched by the hands of industry and modernity. Most accounts also mentioned how favourably Japan compared to the other ‘barbarian peoples’ encountered by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa: the Japanese were
apparently cultured, clean, and unfailingly polite. Townsend Harris, for instance, famously described Japan as the embodiment of a golden age of simplicity and honesty.