Japanese Culture

9 Encounter with the West

9 Encounter with the West In 1844 King William II of Holland dispatched a letter to the shogun of Japan warning him that the quickening pace of world events made continuance of the Japanese policy of national seclusion both unwise and untenable. The development of steam navigation, for one thing, now enabled the ships of Western countries readily to penetrate the most distant waters of the world. China, as noted, had already suffered military defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War, and Japan could not expect to remain aloof from world affairs much longer. Although they debated it among themselves, Tokugawa officials did nothing concrete in response to the letter of the Dutch king. The shogunate was at the time engrossed in the last of its great traditionalistic reforms, and the failure of this reform, combined with vacillation in the face of the now pressing need to seriously reconsider the seclusion policy, portended trouble for the shogunate. The Edo regime was certainly under no immediate threat in the 1840s of being overthrown, but the political temperature in regard to seclusion was rising and could readily become a challenge of a kind that, in gravity, the shogunate had not faced before. This challenge became reality with the arrival in Edo Bay in the summer of 1853 of Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States and his squadron of “black ships.” Perry had been dispatched by President Millard Fillmore to inquire into the possibility of opening diplomatic and commercial relations with Japan, and in 1854 he achieved the first objective through the signing of a Treaty of Friendship that provided for an exchange of consular officials between Japan and the United States. The first American consul, Townsend Harris, arrived in Japan in 1856, and it was he who finally secured a commercial pact. This pact, in addition to providing for the opening of certain Japanese ports to trade, contained a set of stipulations, previously worked out by the Western powers in their dealings with China, that became known as “the unequal treaty provisions.” These included the principle of extraterritoriality, or the right of the Western signatory to try its nationals by its own laws for offenses committed on Japanese soil; the most-favored-nation clause, which provided that any additional treaty benefit acquired by one Western nation 236 Encounter with the West would automatically accrue to all other nations holding similar treaties; and the setting of a fixed customs levy of approximately 5 percent on all goods imported to Japan, a levy that could be altered only with the consent of both parties to a treaty. It was on the basis of the Harris agreement , and especially its most-favored-nation clause, that the principal European powers also acquired commercial treaties with Japan during the next few months. The coming of Perry and Harris brought to an end Japan’s seclusion policy of more than two hundred years, but it did not resolve differences of opinion about the policy. There was the question, for example, of the extent to which Japan should be opened. The Harris treaty specified only that a few ports be made available to foreign trade over a period of years. Should the rest of Japan, even the interior, also be opened to foreign merchants, missionaries, and residents, and if so over what span of time? Some diehards continued to insist that the treaties with the Western “barbarians” be regarded simply as tactical measures valid only until Japan could strengthen itself sufficiently to drive the foreigners once again from the divine land; but other Japanese began to consider more soberly the sweeping and long-term implications of their new relations with the West. The final, chaotic years of the Tokugawa period are fascinating for the momentous political events that led to the overthrow of the shogunate, but they are not especially important to Japanese cultural history and hence may be briefly summarized here. The first wave of opposition to the shogunate’s handling of foreign affairs came primarily from certain of the larger tozama or outside han of western Japan, especially Satsuma and Chòshû. These great domains regarded as anachronistic the Tokugawa governing system whereby they were theoretically excluded from all participation in the conduct of national affairs at Edo. In the early 1860s, the shogunate sought a reconciliation by bringing some of the more important outside daimyos into its deliberative councils. At the same time, it attempted to strengthen relations with Kyoto by...