Japan: Swords and Butterflies - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 257

political, economic, and social upheaval that began when four American warships entered
Tokyo harbor in 1853.
WHAT WAS THE AMERICAN MISSION?
The American battle fleet (two paddle-wheel steamers and two sailing ships) was comman-
ded by Commodore Mathew Perry, who carried a letter from President James Buchanan
to the ruler of Japan. Japan had been closed to the outside world since 1638, when its de
facto ruler, the Shogun (meaning he who quells barbarians), commanded all foreigners to
leave or else be tortured and beheaded. (An exception was made for a limited number of
Dutch traders.) The successor Shogun worried that foreign traders and missionaries sooner
or later would bring foreign armies, which would ultimately lead Japan to fall under for-
eign control.
Reasons for worry abounded. Over the course of three centuries, much of the
East—the Philippines, Malaysia, Indochina, and China—had been disrupted by European
powers. The British fought two wars (the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60) against
China, aimed at forcing the latter to let the East India Company sell opium there. At the
end of the First Opium War, China was forced to cede Hong Kong to Britain and to permit
it to establish an extraterritorial enclave in Shanghai. In 1854 England and France were at
war with Russia (The Crimean War), and they served notice that Russian ships would not
be permitted to find safe harbor in Japan. The industrialized countries of the West were
hungry for raw materials and markets. Africa, Asia, the Near East, and the Pacific Ocean
islands were stark reminders of western colonization. First came merchants and mission-
aries. Then came western demands to control a country's trade. This was followed by de-
mands that foreign merchants, missionaries, and sailors be governed by European laws and
courts rather than by local laws and judges. Then came western warships and soldiers. And
finally, what had once been an independent country was now a colony or, to use a gentler
word, a protectorate. Feudal Japan was no match for western military power, and the Sho-
gun and the other great lords feared that invading foreigners would destroy Japan's social
structure. [229]