OPENING JAPAN

Transportation of Cargo by Westerners at the Port of Yokohama, 1861, by the Japanese artist Utagawa Sadahide, depicts ships in port, including an American one on the left, eight years after Commodore Perry’s first voyage to Japan.

The Mexican War ended with the United States in possession of the magnificent harbors of San Diego and San Francisco, long seen as jumping off points for trade with the Far East. In the 1850s, the United States took the lead in opening Japan, a country that had closed itself to nearly all foreign contact for more than two centuries. In 1853 and 1854, American warships under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry (the younger brother of Oliver Perry, a hero of the War of 1812) sailed into Tokyo Harbor. Perry, who had been sent by President Millard Fillmore to negotiate a trade treaty, demanded that the Japanese deal with him. Alarmed by European intrusions into China and impressed by Perry’s armaments as well as a musical pageant he presented that included a blackface minstrel show, Japanese leaders agreed to do so. In 1854, they opened two ports to American shipping. Two years later, Townsend Harris, a merchant from New York City, arrived as the first American consul (and, according to some accounts, was the inspiration for Puccini’s great opera, Madame Butterfly, about an American who marries and then abandons a Japanese woman). Harris persuaded the Japanese to allow American ships into additional ports and to establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries. As a result, the United States acquired refueling places on the route to China—seen as Asia’s most important trading partner. And Japan soon launched a process of modernization that transformed it into the region’s major military power.

By 1851, with the Gadsden Purchase, the present boundaries of the United States in North America, with the exception of Alaska, had been created.

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