CHAPTER 1: ALIENS ARRIVE
1. Samuel Eliot Morison, “Old Bruin” Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794—1858 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 319.
CHAPTER 2: THE BLACK SHIPS OF THE EVIL MEN
1. Matthew C. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, Abridged and edited by Sidney Wallach (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1952), 53.
2. See “Letter of the President of the United States to the Emperor of Japan,” Appendix A, page 123.
3. In 1846, castaways of the whaler Lawrence were imprisoned and cruelly treated for two and a half years until a Dutch ship was permitted to rescue them. When another whaler, the Lagoda, was wrecked in 1848, its sixteen survivors were locked in cages so small that they couldn’t stand erect. One died and one committed suicide. After being informed of their plight by the Dutch, the United States sent Commander James Glynn to the rescue. In 1849 he sailed an 18-gun ship Preble into Nagasaki harbor and refused to budge until the captives were delivered to him. After Preble, the next American ships to dock in a Japanese harbor were Commodore Perry’s.
4. See Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, 148.
5. Ibid., 53.
CHAPTER 3: HIS HIGH AND MIGHTY MYSTERIOUSNESS
1. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, 51. “The Commodore, also, was well aware that the more exclusive he should make himself and the more unyielding he might be in adhering to his declared intentions, the more respect these people of forms and ceremonies would be disposed to award him. Therefore, he deliberately resolved to confer personally with no one but a functionary of the highest rank in the empire.”
2. Commodore Perry paid for Oliver’s passage to Canton, China. Oliver joined the ship at Hong Kong. The Commodore did this because he did not want to be accused of offering free passage to his son.
3. See Morison, “Old Bruin,” 326.
4.See Matthew C. Perry, The Japan Expedition, 1852—1854, The Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry. Edited by Roger Pineau (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 96.
Perry’s real title, “Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, East India, China and Japan Seas and Special Ambassador to Japan,” should have been sufficient to impress any Oriental potentate!
CHAPTER 4: LANDING ON SACRED SOIL
1. See Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, 88.
2. Ibid., 88.
3. Morison, “Old Bruin,” 335.
CHAPTER 5: THE DUTCH ISLAND PRISON
1. Von Siebold applied for the job of interpreter on Commodore Perry’s expedition but Perry rejected him, suspecting that he was a Russian spy. Perry’s hunch may have been correct: Von Siebold joined the Russian expedition, which reached Nagasaki shortly after Perry. Von Siebold subsequently infuriated the Commodore by writing that Russians, not Americans, had opened Japan to the world.
CHAPTER 6: FOREIGNERS FORBIDDEN
1. A number of “Dutch scholars” were reading European books that had been smuggled in through Deshima. They were especially interested in medicine, astronomy, and weaponry. Many scholars expressed their opposition to Japan’s isolation policy, not only in the 1850s but also during the first half of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER 7: THE GREAT PEACE
1. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (New York: New American Library, 1967), 64.
2.Henry Smith, Learning from Shogun (Santa Barbara: University of California, 1980), 90.
CHAPTER 8: CLOUDS OVER THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN
1. Ryusaka Tsunoda, et al., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 595—597, which contains excerpts of New Proposals by Aizawa Seishisai.
2. Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960), 89.
3. When Perry came back to Japan in 1854, Yoshida Shoin attempted to stow away, but was apprehended by the Japanese. Yoshida Shoin was imprisoned, released, then imprisoned once more because of his radical ideas. He was beheaded at the age of thirty in 1859.
4. Hirakazu Kaneko, Manjiro: The Man Who Discovered America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), 107—108. Lord Mito also stated, “While there is no justification for doubting the character of Manjiro…those barbarians took advantage of his boyhood, bestowed special favors upon him…as he had been saved by them [the Americans] and had been under their care from his boyhood until he was twenty years of age, he owes a debt of gratitude to them and, therefore, it is inconceivable that he should act contrary to their interests. Under no circumstances should he be permitted to go on one of the ships to meet those barbarians.”
5. Ibid., 88.
6. Ibid., 100.
7. Emily V. Warinner, Voyager to Destiny (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1956), 251—253, and Kaneko, Manjiro, 96—98.
8. When Perry returned in 1854, Manjiro translated official documents while being guarded in Edo to prevent him from contacting Americans. After the treaty was signed, Manjiro became an eminent teacher in political and educational circles. He taught navigation and ship engineering and wrote A Short Cut to English Conversation, the standard text of the time. He also developed Japan’s whaling industry. By the time trade was established with the United States, he helped Westernize Japan. After 1860 Manjiro could be seen wearing his traditional kimono and hakama (skirtlike trousers that envelop the kimono up to the waist), an American derby hat, and Western shoes.
CHAPTER 9: THE BLACK SHIPS RETURN
1. Shogun Ieyoshi died on July 27, 1853, just ten days after Perry’s first visit ended. He was succeeded by his son, Iesada, who took office on November 22, 1853.
2. See Morison, “Old Bruin,” 359.
3. See Warinner, Voyager to Destiny, 157.
4. George Henry Preble, The Opening of Japan: A Diary of Discovery in the Far East, 1853—1856 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 125—126. “The Lieut. Gov. of Uraga told some of our officers of course through interpreters, that when the Treaty was signed we could have plenty of Japanese wives, but said their women did not like mustachios, and hoped when the officers came to see them they would shave them off. From this we have decided that henceforth in Japan, the morality of an officer is to be known by the length of his mustache.”
5. Before the Perry expedition left, Patch felt sufficiently safe to visit his family. The Japanese government promised him freedom if he stayed, but he preferred life as an American seaman. Patch subsequently returned to New York State with Jonathan Goble, a shipmatc who became a missionary. He and his missionary friend settled in Japan after 1860. Both died there.
CHAPTER 10: THE TREATY HOUSE
1. See Preble, The Opening of Japan, 120.
2. Arthur Walworth, Black Ships Off Japan: The Story of Commodore Perry’s Expedition (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966), 172.
CHAPTER 11: AN ARRAY OF GIFTS
1. See Preble, The Opening of Japan, 146.
2. Ibid., 146.
3. See Williams, “Journal of the Perry Expedition to Japan,” Asiatic Society of Japan, Transactions XXXVI (1910): 131—134.
4. See Preble, The Opening of Japan, 148—149.
5. See Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, 192—194.
6. See Williams, Transactions, 131—134.
CHAPTER 12: THE GRAND BANQUET
1. Commodore Perry changed his flagship from the Susquehanna to the Powhatan after this ship joined his squadron at Hong Kong on August 25, 1853.
2. Decades before Perry arrived some statesmen and political writers were urging the government to consider ending its isolation policy. Because American, British, and Russian ships frequently sailed near their shores, they believed that eventually Japan would have to make a treaty with a foreign power in order to prevent an invasion.
3. See Perry, The Japanese Expedition, 188.
4. See Preble, The Opening of Japan, page 153.
5. Ibid., 152.
6. Ibid., 152.
7. See Morison, “Old Bruin,” 378.
CHAPTER 13: THE TREATY
1. See Morison, “Old Bruin,” 380.
2. Edward McCauley, With Perry in Japan: The Diary of Edward York McCauley (Princeton, N.J.: 1942), 81.
3. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, 208.
CHAPTER 14: EXCURSIONS ON LAND AND SEA
1. See Preble, The Opening of Japan, 123. Preble also wrote, “To inexperienced eyes the dress of the two sexes is so much alike, that but for the manner of wearing their hair, and this custom of staining the teeth, it would be difficult to tell male from female.”
2. See Williams, Transactions, 131—134.
3. Oliver Statler, The Black Ship Scroll (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1964), 13.
4. See Perry, The Japan Expedition, 200.
5. Ibid., 198.
CHAPTER 15: SHORE LEAVE
1. See Statler, The Black Ship Scroll, 15.
2. See Preble, The Opening of Japan, 183.
3. See Statler, The Black Ship Scroll, 27.
4. See Perry, Narrative of the Expedition, 234—235. Commodore Perry “…sent an officer on shore in order to quiet the excitement which had been created and to interpose as far as possible in behalf of the poor fellows…. If the Commodore had felt himself at liberty to indulge his feelings, he would have gladly given the poor Japanese refuge on board his ship.”
5. See Morison, “Old Bruin,” 393.
CHAPTER 16: IN THE WAKE OF THE BLACK SHIPS
1. See Howard F. van Zandt, Pioneer American Merchants in Japan (Tokyo: Lotus Press Limited, 1980), for a detailed account of the first American civilians in Japan.
AFTERWORD
1. Yonekura Isamu, “The History of the Imperial Family,” The East (November 1975), 25.
2. Ibid.