Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan
Matthew Perry sailed four warships into Edo Bay in July 1853 and demanded that Japan open itself to trade. Japan had restricted foreign contact for over two hundred years to a Dutch post at Nagasaki, Chinese ships and the Korean and Ryukyuan embassies, and had turned away every American approach. Perry's instructions were to obtain coaling rights, protection for shipwrecked whalers and a commercial treaty, and his method was to refuse to deal with anyone but the highest authority and to refuse to leave. Two of his ships were steam-powered, black-hulled and could move against the wind, which is why the Japanese called them the black ships, and he had his guns fire blank salutes ostensibly in celebration. He delivered President Fillmore's letter, announced that he would return the following spring for an answer with a larger force, and left. The shogunate did something unprecedented in the interval: it circulated the letter to the daimyo and to the imperial court and asked for opinions, which advertised that it did not know what to do and opened the political question of who governed Japan. Perry came back in February 1854 with nine ships, and the Convention of Kanagawa was signed in March, opening two ports and allowing a consul. Consular treaties with extraterritoriality and fixed tariffs followed within four years, imposed by Townsend Harris on the same basis. The shogunate never recovered the authority it lost, and the domains that overthrew it in 1868 did so under a slogan calling for the expulsion of the barbarians, then industrialised at speed instead. Perry himself died in 1858 and did not see any of it. A Japanese fleet built on the model of the one he brought destroyed the Russian navy at Tsushima forty-seven years after his second visit.
- Year: 1853 CE
- Category: Political
