commodore perry and the opening up of japan

1. Japan before Perry:

Historically, Japan was an island country that became unified around 660 A.D. Bordered by countries with a much earlier history, including Korea and China, Japan borrowed extensively from mainland Asia in its early development. Starting from around 1150, Japan became a more militarized society and its civilian aristocracy was gradually transformed into a military one through civil war and dealings with outside enemies such as the Mongol invaders in 1273 and 1281. The military aristocracy, similar to the European nobility in the Middle Ages, kept their own domains and had the title of daimyo. Not all daimyo were the same, with some possessing much larger domains than others. The head of the military aristocracy was called the shogun, or military general, a title confered by the emperor for leading state defense. As time went on, the shogun came to acquire more power than the emperor. Each of the daimyo was faced with some pressure to acknowledge the shogun's leadership. In the household of each daimyo there were many military retainers, called the samurai, a term that referred to both the military aristocracy as a class and the foot soldiers in that class. The samurai were further divided into lower and higher sub-classes.

Starting from 1603, after a period of civil war, a samurai family called the Tokugawas became the shogun in Japan that ruled until 1867. The Tokugawa shogunate avoided clashes with the emperor by removing the shogunate from the capital Kyoto, meaning western capital, to Edo in the eastern part of Honshu. Since the emperor claimed to descend from divinities, in particular the sun goddess Amaterasu, the shogun who acquired his power by force could not compete with that claim to authority. Therefore the shogun introduced Confucian learning to justify rule by ability, as the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius emphasized the importance of education in cultivating leadership. Also according to Confucian teachings, the shogunate divided the Japanese society into different layers of social classes, with the samurai at the top, farmers, artisans and merchants on the lower levels of society. To protect the social hierarchy, learning from China, the Tokugawa shogunate closed Japan to the outside world, allowing onlly limited trade with Asia through Nagasaki in Kyushu and limiting Europeans in Japan to only the Dutch, confined to a small man-made island off Nagasaki called Deshima. This way, they thought they could maintain their rule without being affected by the growing international trade and commerce of the time, as trade and commerce were the most effective ways to disrupt a social hierarchy based on birthrights.

Because their were the nobility, the samurai had to follow certain codes of conduct. They were not only required to wear two swords (they were the only ones who could do it--commoners would lose their head if they wore swords), but also were forbidden from doing the "demeaning things" such as appearing in the market, or watching shows. There would from time to time be visitors to the market and to shows who would have their faces all covered up, revealing only two eyes and nostrils, these would be the samurai who were in the "wrong places" and had to cover up their identities so as not to disgrace themselves and their class. The samurai had to observe rigorous discipline, hence no entertainments, or shows. They were supposed to disdain money, a corrupting and softening force, so no direct contact with monetary transactions. The Tokugawas were fairly successful in maintaining their rule except for that their governance was disrupted by the incoming foreigners.

2. The Industrial Revolution and Western march to Asia.

Japan's closedness to the outside world was maintained for about two hundred years, when only the Dutch and some Chinese/Koreans had limited access to Japanese society. After 1800, as European countries underwent the Industrial Revolution, more and more of them came to search for market for their manufactured goods in Asia. They first found China, and when trade between Britain and China did not work out well, a war was fought between the two, called The First Opium War. China was defeated and had to make heavy financial and territorial compensations to Britain, which alarmed the Japanese. Fearing foreign invasion and a fate similar to that of China, the Tokugawa government, or bakufu, was unwilling to change, nor were the samurai as a whole. Prior to Commodore Perry's visit, the Japanese had a few random encounters with the Americans. The first encounter, with an American merchant ship Morrison that sailed from China in search of opportunities for trade with Japan, was greeted with mortar in both Edo Bay and Kagoshima in 1837. In 1846, another U.S. ship, this time the USS Lagoda, a whaler, was shipwrecked off a northern island and 18 sailors were imprisoned in Nagasaki, who were later arranged for release by an American naval commander Jamese Glynn in 1848. In 1846, the American commander James Biddle, with two American battleships, sailed to Edo Bay to negotiate trade with Japan but was repelled. Prior to this, Japan also turned down British, Russian, and even Dutch requests for trade.

After annexing Oregon and California in the 1840s and 1850s, the U.S. was more in a position than ever before to trade with Asia. Starting from the 1820s, American whalers had already started whaling off the Japanese coast, and the inconvenience caused by the shogun's isolationist policies, the imprisonment of shipwrecked sailors, caused American politicians to propose the establishment of official relations with Japan. American business with China nearby also added to the incentive of a diplomatic relationship with Japan.

3. Commodore Perry and Japan

In 1852, President Millard Fillmore authorizzed the dispatch of a naval expedition to Japan and drafted a letter for delivery to its authorities that set forth America's objectives. The naval fleet was led by Commodore Matthew Perry, a veteran from the Mexican War and descendant of a distinguished naval family. Perry sailed from Newport, Rhode Island, with four warships, in November 1852. He sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, crossing the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean and via China, finally arriving in Edo Bay in July 1853. Because two of Perry's ships were steamships belching black smoke, a terrific sight to most Japanese who had not seen steamships before, they were called the Black Ships. Perry was instructed to negotiate with the Japanese for trade but if the latter refused, he was allowed to change tone and warn the Japanese of the dire consequences for not agreeing to American terms. (McClain, 136-137; Hopper, 60-61) After presenting his requests to the Tokugawa government, Perry promised to come back in 1854 for an answer. The Japanese, frightened, tried to accommodate the Americans on their return trip in 1854 with an exhibition of sumo wrestling, but the Americans were not amused, describing it as "shoving, yelling, tugging, hawling, bawling, twisting, and curvetting about, with seemingly no aim whatever." (Gordon, 49)

The Japanese shogunate was confused and filled with anxiety at the American's request. Drawing a lesson from China's defeat by Britain, the shogun decided he could not turn down American requests. Two ports on Honshu and Hokkaido were opened to American ships. By 1858, more concessions were made by the Tokugawa shogunate to the U.S., including extraterritoriality--immunity of Americans from Japanese law while in Japan; and one-sided most favored nation status: low tariffs on American goods in Japan.

4. The revolt of the samurai and the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Even though many samurai regarded some concessions to the West as something sad but inevitable, they were shocked by the amount of concessions by the Tokugawa government. In 1860, Ii Naosuke, regent to the 12 year old shogun Tokugawa Iemochi, was assassinated because of his endorsement of the treaties with the U.S. and European countries. Some large daimyo clans, especially the Satsuma and Choshu clans, realized that to rebuild Japan, it was inevitable to learn from the West, and seeing the weakness and lack of clout of the Tokugawa shogunate, they decided to transform Japan under the authority of the emperor. Their insubordination to the Tokugawa regime led to fightings between the bakufu troops and their troops between 1866 and 1867, finally leading to the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu's surrender and resignation as shogun, and the "ushering in" of the 15 year old emperor Meiji to the center of political leadership. From then on, Japan continued to Westernize under a strong government with the emperor at the center.

 

References:

James McClain, Japan, a Modern History (W.W. Norton, 2002).

Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Helen Hopper, Fukuzawa Yukichi: from Samurai to Capitalist (Pearson Education, 2005).