The Japan that Could Say Maybe
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing THE JAPAN THAT COULD SAY MAYBE BY ROGER DRAPER FROM the 1630s until March31,1854, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry of theU.S. Navy signed a treaty of "firm, lasting, and...
...Six years later, on learning about American whalers who were stranded in Japan, the chief of the U.S...
...Perry dashed those hopes...
...Yet never did Perry press a point beyond endurable limits...
...In late 1852, Perry sailed off bearing a communication from President Millard Fillmore suggesting that Japan suspend its ban on overseas commerce for five or 10 years...
...together and to reach beyond to the markets of China and the Pacific," Wiley writes...
...The Secretary told him to plan a Japanese expedition and eventually chose him to lead it...
...manufactures...
...Virtually all of the serious work on the other side of the story has been written in Japanese, chiefly on the basis of documents in that language...
...On the whole, it was a brilliant performance...
...It therefore had to be assumed that Perry would easily win a formal military engagement...
...Hitherto it had been a matter of dispute as to whether we required a Navy at all, as opposed to a Coast Guard...
...Now we envisioned the Far East as a possible market for U.S...
...a Commerce Department trade negotiator in the 1980s) has written, "always casts its bureaucrats in the role of defending the sacred islands from invasion...
...Before 1846-48, when we suddenly acquired a West Coast, only mercantile circles in the Northeast took much interest in the Pacific...
...There was just one form of ongoing contact between the empire and this country...
...Japanese law required the destruction or ejection of all foreign ships that made it to the shore, but the Shogun's administration, or Bakufu, was terrified of reprisals...
...He had spent several of his years in the service overseeing the construction of these very mail steamboats, a matter of interest to the Navy not only because of its larger mission but also because it could use them in wartime...
...Britain was further off thanRussia yet had the world's biggest Navy, and used it persistently to test the policy of seclusion...
...If so, Wiley correctly replies, "it is difficult to understand...
...Japan could not apply what was then as now the national diplomatic strategy: burakashiseisaku, or "keep them hanging on...
...just what Perry, by his own account, was doing...
...The strongest seclusionists, believing that the West could defeat Japan in battles but not occupy it, were prepared at this point to refuse any treaty at all...
...Perry took his flotilla of four ships, 61 guns and 967 men to the vicinity of Edo (Tokyo...
...Japan, as Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr...
...Japan, with its population of 30 million, 10 million more than ours, was an element in the new thinking...
...At first Tokugawa Ieyasu, the generalissimo (or Shogun) who ruled the country, supposedly as the Emperor's deputy, quite admired the Western religion and hoped to grow rich by encouraging foreign trade...
...S.] East Coast," the same firm was constructing a railroad across the isthmus...
...Practically no one considered foreign trade to be desirable in itself...
...By 1600, Christians may have numbered upward of half a million, and the Japanese were trading with China, Korea, Mexico, and Europe...
...When the Japanese argued that the recent death of the Shogun ruled out an immediate discussion of the American proposal...
...Meanwhile, he explored Edo Bay in defiance of his hosts' orders and generally made himself a pain in the neck...
...Navy signed a treaty of "firm, lasting, and sincere friendship" with Japan, that distant and mysterious empire was almost wholly closed to outsiders...
...Indeed, the Japanese no longer reject foreign trade yet are hardly closer today to accepting free trade, a doctrine as bizarre to them as seclusion would be to us, although their government tries to conceal this...
...Yankees in the Land of the Gods (Viking, 579pp., $24.95), by Peter Booth Wiley, is the fascinating and very well-told story of Perry's expedition to open Japan and of the country's ineffectual attempts to deflect him...
...Amonth before Glynn's letter was made public, the Secretary of the Navy had privately received a similar note from Perry...
...Japan entered into these calculations because steamers consumed vast quantities of coal and therefore required a regular succession of refueling stations...
...Glynn wanted Washington to help create a California-to-Shanghai steamboat route...
...Japan withdrew into "seclusion" after about a century of unprecedented openness to the world...
...Increased demand for whale oil had raised the number of Yankee whaling vessels entering the Sea of Japan, where many ships were wrecked...
...Very soon, however, the great ocean and the teeming lands beyond it—three weeks by steamboat out of San Francisco—began to excite American imaginations...
...Since even China resisted Western efforts at commercial penetration, there seemed to be no way to secure our ends short of naval force...
...It was "part of a concerted effort to tie the country...
...His attitude changed as he discovered that Spain and Portugal had divided America and the Orient between themselves, and that Japan lay within the Hispanic sphere, like the Philippines, recently made a Spanish colony...
...Japan, of course, feared the British too...
...The firm that received Glynn's letter had U.S...
...Before Perry most prospective openers of Japan tried to impress the Japanese with their politeness, their respect for the Emperor and so forth...
...In fact, the treaty did not authorize trade...
...government subsidies to build and operate a mail steamboat monopoly linking the Pacific side of Panama to California...
...By then very few Americans noticed...
...A Navy had to have a mission...
...It would be 40 per cent shorter than Britain's sea lane to the Orient, around Africa...
...One was found in the projection of American power throughout the Far East, in hopes of promoting our commerce and industry...
...Perry's only serious biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison, admitted that his subject was an imperialist but added, "an imperialist with adifference, eschewing forcible annexation, punitive expeditions, or forcing religion or trade on people who desired neither...
...Thanks to the help of Korogi Ichiro a translator, Wiley is the first Western historian to take his readers into the higher reaches of the Bakufu...
...In the early 1850s, one branch of international transport that remained mostly under British control was the intercontinental delivery of mail via steamboat...
...colonies on islands south and southeast of Japan, as well as to "extend the advantages of our national friendship and protection" to the lands of Southeast Asia...
...The majority, fearing that even if the land of the gods were to escape occupation, repeated drubbings would fatally undermine the Bakufu's prestige, accepted the idea of an agreement as inevitable...
...Ultimately their dread of the West became so intense that the Japanese were forbidden to leave their homeland, and European commerce was cut down to a single ship of Western goods sent each year to Nagasaki by the Dutch...
...In both countries, the expedition gave rise to enduring historical metaphors...
...Now we leam that most officials wanted to modernize them, but not much was done because the cost threatened to destabilize the regime...
...It had long been known that the Dutch had warned Japan of Perry's plans in advance, and that its defenses were 250 years out-of-date...
...Shortly after those arrangements were completed, a new set of Western barbarians appeared directly to the north: The Cossacks, having expanded across Siberia, built a town on the Sea of Okhotsk and proceeded to seize the Kurile Island chain...
...Japanese officials were told that he insisted on delivering the President's message there and not, as they had requested, in Nagasaki...
...But it was the "flowery-flagged devils" who sent the right man at the right time...
...Perry hinted darkly of bringing a larger force...
...Perry had ventured off at a time of great interest in thePacific.He came back to an inward-turning republic that cared little about the agreement and less about his proposal to establish U.S...
...East India Squadron sent the USS Preble to fetch them...
...it stipulated only the sale of provisions, including coal, at two Japanese ports, and the payment was officially termed a "gift...
...The real target was Britain...
...Our merchant marine, the largest on earth, had started to dominate international trade with China but had to pay for its goods with Turkish opium, the sole Western product the Chinese had ever wanted to buy...
...Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, and France had all sought to unlock the door...
...In what Wiley calls "an effort to extend their monopoly backward to the ports of the [U...
...In 1858, shortly after his death, it did...
...Ieyasu's successors suppressed Christianity...
...Portuguese seamen reached the islands in 1542, and missionaries quickly followed...
...They usually came to Nagasaki, the city of foreign trade, and left quickly without demanding a response...
...The Iberian powers, Wiley observes, were replaced in the nightmares of its people by the Russians...
...To the dismay of American public opinion, they had been horribly mistreated...
...In 1806-07 Tsarist forces raided outlying settlements in Japan...
...Alas, we have no Perry to thwart its maneuvers to keep us hanging on...
...James Glynn, the Preble's commander, took advantage of the moment to send an open letter to a New York merchant house, suggesting that the incident furnished "a good cause of a quarrel...
...Hence the failureof Russian schemes to establish commercial relations, including the dispatch of an admiral in 1853 to compete directly against Perry...
...The United States had never generated similar anxieties...
...The United States, notes Wiley, complains that Tokyo's restrictive policies repeatedly force us to demand "the second opening of Japan...
...Japan was to be merely our ostensible opponent...
...A facility in Japan would be terribly useful, and this, in the author's view, was at the heart of Perry's undertaking...
...Perry maintained that a true commercial treaty would follow...
...In 1843, it decided to give the intruders water and supplies before compelling their departure, and to repatriate individual castaways...
...Everyonein the Bakufu regarded negotiations as inevitable and hoped the Commodore could be sent on his merry way with a promise to reconsider seclusion at some time in the future...
Vol. 74 • February 1991 • No. 3
