Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 2 ·
Black Ships and the opening of Japan
Chapter 2 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “The Black Ships”
On 8 July 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry anchored four US warships at Uraga and asked Japan to open its ports. The shogunate signed the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854, opening Shimoda and Hakodate, and in 1858 Townsend Harris won a commercial treaty whose terms and politics shook the shogunate.
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The map above is the world of Japan, July 1859 — Ports open; Russia takes the Amur.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Japan’s transition began with a demand from outside, and the way the old order answered it decided much of what followed. On 8 July 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy anchored four warships at Uraga, at the mouth of the bay below Edo, the shogun’s capital and today’s Tokyo, and handed over a letter asking Japan to open its ports. Two of his ships were steamers that could move against the wind, and their guns could reach the capital’s waterfront. The shogunate, the hereditary military government that ruled from Edo in the emperor’s name, much as a strongman governs behind a figurehead king, knew that China had just lost a war to Britain. It therefore signed the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854, opening the small ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships. In 1858 the American consul Townsend Harris, a diplomat posted abroad to look after his country’s traders, won a full commercial treaty, and because Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands at once demanded the same terms, one concession became a system binding Japan to every Western power.
These “unequal treaties” took from Japan control of its own courts and customs, and the way they were signed took from the shogunate its claim to speak for Japan. They opened treaty ports where foreigners could live and trade, the blue dots on the map. There foreigners enjoyed extraterritoriality, meaning that a foreigner accused of a crime was tried by his own consul under his own country’s law, much as if every foreign resident carried a diplomat’s immunity from local courts. Japan’s tariffs, the taxes it charged on imports, were fixed by the treaties, so it could neither protect new industries nor raise revenue at its borders. The shogun’s chief minister, Ii Naosuke, then had the 1858 treaty signed although Emperor Kōmei had refused to approve it, and every opponent gained a cause and a rallying point in an emperor who said no. The treaties hurt Japan’s finances, and they hurt the shogunate more, because they started an argument about who had the right to decide for Japan.
The full story
Perry’s squadron forced the shogunate, the shogun’s military government in Edo, today’s Tokyo, into decisions that exposed how its power worked, although its guns never fired in anger. The United States wanted coal for steamships crossing the Pacific to China, safety for American whalers in Japanese waters, and trade, and Perry refused to go to Nagasaki, where foreigners were supposed to be received. A month later a Russian squadron under Admiral Putyatin reached Nagasaki, the arrow from the west, so the shogunate faced two powers at once. The senior councillor Abe Masahiro then did something no shogunal government had done: he sent the American letter to the daimyo, the 260-odd lords who ran their own domains much as governors run semi-independent states, and to the emperor’s court in Kyoto, and asked for their opinions. Most lords advised refusal or delay, and none could offer a fleet, so in 1854 the shogunate signed at Kanagawa, opening Shimoda and Hakodate for supplies. By asking for advice, the shogunate admitted that it could no longer decide foreign policy alone.
The commercial treaty of 1858 turned contact into an economic shock. Townsend Harris, the American consul at Shimoda since 1856, used Britain’s new war against China as a warning that a fleet might demand harsher terms. The treaty opened Kanagawa, which became the port of Yokohama, along with Nagasaki and Hakodate in 1859, and it fixed Japan’s tariffs, its taxes on imports, at low rates that the foreign powers had to approve before they could change. Traders soon found that gold was cheap in Japan, where an ounce bought about five of silver against about fifteen abroad, so gold drained away until the shogunate debased its coins in 1860, minting them with less gold to stop the drain. Exports of raw silk and tea boomed, and prices rose faster than wages or the fixed rice salaries of the samurai, the hereditary warrior-officials. Opening the ports made some merchants and silk farmers rich, and it made the cost of living a political grievance for almost everyone else.
The political crisis came from inside Edo Castle, where a quarrel over the succession merged with the quarrel over the treaty, and Russia’s advance in the north made it urgent. The sickly shogun Iesada had no heir, and reforming lords such as Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma backed the able Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, while conservative officials preferred a boy from the Kii branch of the Tokugawa family. In 1858 the minister Hotta Masayoshi came back from Kyoto with the emperor’s refusal to approve the Harris treaty. Because Russia had just taken the north bank of the Amur from China by the Treaty of Aigun, turning the land above the river from tan to blue, the treaty party argued that delay would only invite harsher terms. Ii Naosuke, newly appointed as tairō, a chief minister with emergency powers, had it signed anyway, installed the boy shogun Iemochi and purged his critics. Within five years of Perry’s arrival the shogunate had shown that it could neither keep foreigners out nor command the consent of the lords it ruled.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Gunboat diplomacy, and what Perry actually wanted
The phrase gunboat diplomacy describes using the visible threat of naval force to win concessions without war, and Perry’s mission is its classic case. His orders from Washington forbade him to fire except in self-defence, so the threat had to stay implied: he refused the usual route to Nagasaki, sailed survey boats into Edo Bay, and insisted on delivering President Fillmore’s letter to high officials. The letter itself spoke politely of friendship, coal, castaways and trade, which let the threat stay unspoken. Michael Auslin’s study of the treaty negotiations shows that the Japanese side was far from passive. The negotiator Hayashi Akira kept any trade clause out of the 1854 treaty, and later officials bargained hard over ports and dates. Historians therefore read Kanagawa as a limited concession won by threat and limited by skilful negotiation. The real coercion came in 1858, when Harris could point to British and French warships in China and present his own terms as the gentler option.
Abe Masahiro’s consultation and the shogunate’s own reforms
Abe’s decision to circulate the American letter in 1853 is often treated as the moment the shogunate’s monopoly on national policy ended. Hundreds of replies came back from lords, bannermen (the shogun’s own hereditary retainers, something like a household guard turned civil service) and scholars, and most opposed opening the country without proposing how to resist. Conrad Totman argues that the shogunate should not be dismissed as merely backward, because in the same years it reformed vigorously. It lifted the ban on large ships, ordered steam warships from the Netherlands, opened a naval training school at Nagasaki in 1855 with Dutch instructors, and founded an institute for Western studies in Edo in 1856. The trouble lay in its politics, since every reform raised the question of who would pay, and consultation invited the outer lords and the court into decisions they had been excluded from for two centuries. The shogunate was modernising and losing authority at the same time, a combination that recurs in this atlas’s second half.
The economics of the open ports
Economic historians agree that the treaties caused a sharp price shock, while they disagree about how much of the later political turmoil it explains. Two forces were at work on prices. The first was the gold drain: because the official ratio of gold to silver in Japan was about one to five and in world markets about one to fifteen, foreign traders could profit simply by exchanging silver for Japanese gold coins, and the shogunate stopped the outflow only by issuing lighter gold coins in 1860, which pushed prices up. The second was the export boom, as European buyers took Japanese raw silk during a silkworm disease in France and Italy, and tea shipments grew. Rice prices in Osaka rose several times over between 1859 and 1867. Winners included export merchants and silk-raising villages in central Japan; losers included urban labourers, the silk weavers of Kyoto who lost their raw material, and samurai on fixed stipends. Inflation gave the political slogans of the 1860s a material grievance to feed on.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Steam and the Pacific brought America to Japan. The United States had gained California in 1848 and wanted a steamship route to China, which needed coaling stations on the way. American whaling fleets worked the waters off Japan, and sailors wrecked there were sometimes imprisoned. These interests made Japan a stop on a commercial highway for the first time. Perry’s mission was a product of the steam age: his two steamers could ignore the winds that had kept sailing ships at the mercy of Japan’s coast for centuries.
A government without a navy could only delay. The divided state described in chapter 1 had no fleet, no national army and no means to pay for either quickly. Abe’s officials built batteries on artificial islands in Edo Bay after 1853, but they knew that Chinese forts had been destroyed by ships like Perry’s. Refusal meant war and war meant defeat, so the only open question was how much to concede and how to explain it. The shogunate’s weakness turned diplomacy into a choice between humiliations.
Consultation widened the circle of decision-makers. By asking the daimyo and the court for advice in 1853, Abe hoped to share responsibility for an unpopular decision. Instead he taught the outer lords and the court that they had a legitimate voice in national policy, which they had been denied since 1600. Once the court was asked, its refusal in 1858 carried weight. A consultation meant to strengthen the government created the alternative authority that would replace it.
A succession quarrel turned diplomacy into a feud. The question of who would succeed the heirless shogun Iesada split the elite in 1857–58. Reforming lords, including Satsuma’s Shimazu Nariakira and Mito’s Tokugawa Nariaki, backed Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu; the conservative officials around Ii Naosuke backed a twelve-year-old from the Kii branch. Because the same men disagreed about the treaty, foreign policy and the succession became one fight, and Ii’s victory on both turned his rivals into enemies of the shogunate itself.
THE TURNING POINT
The Harris treaty signed, 29 July 1858. Signing the Harris treaty without the emperor’s approval is the hinge because it converted a diplomatic retreat into a crisis of legitimacy. Until then the shogunate could claim to rule on the emperor’s behalf; now it had openly defied him. Ii then deepened the break with the Ansei Purge, in which great lords were confined and young activists such as the Chōshū teacher Yoshida Shōin were executed. On 24 March 1860 samurai, most of them from Mito, killed Ii outside the Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle, and the shogunate never again recovered the authority he had spent.
What it changed
Terror entered politics. Ii’s assassination opened a decade in which young samurai calling themselves “men of high purpose” (shishi) murdered officials and foreigners in the emperor’s name. Political violence became a way to force decisions on governments that could not keep order. The movement drew many of its members from Chōshū, Tosa and Satsuma, the domains that would lead the next stage.
Kyoto became a second capital. After 1858 lords and activists flocked to Kyoto, and the court, powerless for two and a half centuries, became a centre of decision. The shogunate itself tried to repair its standing by marrying the emperor’s sister to the young shogun in 1862. Every policy now needed two approvals, and the emperor’s approval carried the moral weight.
Open ports remade prices and livelihoods. Yokohama grew from a fishing village into Japan’s main trading port, and raw silk became the country’s largest export. Silk-raising districts prospered while urban workers and samurai lost to inflation. The trade also gave Japanese merchants and officials their first close look at Western commerce, knowledge that the Meiji state would later use to build industry.
Russia’s advance redrew the north. By the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking in 1860, Russia took from China the lands north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri, and founded Vladivostok, whose name means “ruler of the East”. In 1861 a Russian warship occupied part of Tsushima for six months. Fear of Russia would shape Japanese strategy for half a century, through Korea to the war of 1904.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did the unequal treaties weaken Japan more through their economic terms or through the political crisis they caused?
The economic case is substantial: fixed tariffs denied the government customs revenue and protection for new industries until 1911, the gold drain and export boom drove inflation, and extraterritoriality placed foreigners beyond Japanese law. Yet the economic losses were manageable compared with China’s, and trade also brought new wealth to silk districts and merchants. The political consequences were larger and faster. Signing without the emperor’s approval made the shogunate look disloyal, the purge that followed made enemies of the most capable lords, and within ten years the shogunate was gone. Historians such as W. G. Beasley therefore see the treaties above all as a political catalyst, whose economic harm was real yet manageable. The economic terms framed Meiji Japan’s long campaign for equality, while the political crisis decided who would wage it. The lesson that transfers is that a government’s concessions to outside pressure can do their greatest damage to the belief that it has the right to rule.
An interesting fact
Among Perry’s gifts in 1854 was a working miniature steam railway, with an engine, a carriage and a circle of track laid out near Yokohama. The carriage was built for children, so the Japanese officials who tried it rode clinging to its roof, robes flying, at about twenty miles an hour, a scene recorded in Perry’s official narrative. The Americans also strung a telegraph line about a mile long. The Japanese side answered with silks, lacquer and a display by sumo wrestlers who carried heavy rice bales with ease, a reminder that both delegations were staging power for the other.
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