466 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
powers to do it for him. He created a modern army; he built railroads, which
opened up the interior to commercial development and assisted in extending
the capital’s control over outlying provinces; and he reformed education and
modernized the revenue system.The Meiji Era
Late on a summer day in 1853, 20,000 troops belonging to the shogun
looked helplessly out over Tokyo bay as four American ships dropped anchor.
For 250 years, Japan had closed itself to foreign nations and dealt harshly with
the occasional shipwrecked sailor or tentative call paid by a hopeful merchant
ship. But these American ships, two of them steamers, all of them heavily
armed, could not be resisted by the soldiers on the hillside. They could mow
down the wooden residences and warehouses edging the bay. The Japanese
would have to deal with the barbarians.
Japan had kept so successfully closed that Admiral Perry did not under-
stand the power structure of the society he sought to visit. The ruler at Edo was
the shogun, but Perry thought this was the emperor. With his keen sense of the
ceremonial, Perry had himself welcomed ashore with his own Marine band in
full dress; as a sign of the technological delights to be had through trade with
Americans, he presented a working model of a railroad. Like the British in
China, what he sought was a treaty of trade between his country and Japan. He
was not allowed to see the shogun, so he left letters and gifts, stoked up the
steam engines, and said he’d be back the following spring.
The commotion that followed was not entirely Perry’s doing, but his visit did
usher in a 15-year period known as the bakumatsu, or “end of the shogun’s rule”
(1853–1868). The Tokugawa dynasty was long past its prime, indecisive, rigid,
and on the verge of bankruptcy. The energy of the samurai class of earlier time
had dissipated as samurai were turned into urbanized bureaucrats whose swords
had become merely precious ornaments and heirlooms, and their warrior lifestyle
replaced by the martial arts. When Perry returned with eight ships and then nego-
tiations stretched to four years, the weakness of the shogunate was on public view.
Unable to make the decision himself, the shogun took the extraordinary step of
circulating the draft of the treaty among the daimyo and asking for their opinions.
They offered a mixed set of responses. Some saw potential good from limited and
controlled trade with the West; others foresaw a dangerous future in which bar-
barian commercial values would infect and corrupt samurai ones. In the end, the
shogun signed a treaty much like those forced on China: certain port cities were
designated treaty ports, customs duties were kept low, and resident Americans
were governed under their own laws by the principle of extraterritoriality.
For many reflective Japanese—most of them from the privileged samurai
class—the next decade was one of painful reevaluation of their own heritage.
Most remained full of respect for the classical samurai ideals but did not see
those ideals in evidence around them. The shogun’s ineffectualness embar-