Matthew Perry & Japan: Sticking to His Guns

Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe and American Imperialism in 1853.
By George Feifer.
Collins Smithsonian Books.
389 pp. $25.95.


Reviewed by James Dalglish
( is a freelance writer and university lecturer living in New York State and the Middle East)

“The bay of Uraga lies beside a town of the same name that controlled the entrance to far larger Edo--now Tokyo--Bay... five thousand warriors waited on the smaller bay's shore at dawn of that day July 14. All were riveted by the source of their dread, now clearly discernible in the advancing morning light: four giant war-ships of America's East Asia Squadron." (page 4)

Such is the breathless cinematic debut of George Feifer’s Breaking Open Japan, a new and comprehensive study of the crucial events in which an American naval commander, in the mid-nineteenth century, unlocked the heretofore secluded nation of Japan to relations with America and the rest of the world -- famously, without “firing a shot.”
The author puts you believably into the scene, then switches to a series of key background topics, social, historic and economic, that illuminate and explain the coming conflict between the two nations, as well as filling in the basics about the book's principal actor Commodore Matthew Perry, sent by President Fillmore with a powerful squadron of warships to establish relations with Japan.

Then back to the story:

“Dashing up the Uraga waterway, the ships ignored a large sign in French on a native boat: ‘Depart immediately and dare not anchor!’ Anchor is what they proceeded to do, obeying their commander’s flag signal to form a line of battle outside the town and to conduct no communication whatever with the shore.”

I quote these lines because the sense of suspense, bolstered by existential detail, is necessary to get us hooked on the strange, faraway story, and Feifer succeeds brilliantly on this level. Though there is little or overt violence, there is plenty of menace and drama in the tale of Perry’s critical two visits, enough to spread the story through some seventeen chapters.

Anti-imperialists and doves may be embarrassed by the arrogance of Perry’s tactics and his “keep the natives down” mentality, but no question: his strategy succeeded in spades. He meant to frighten the Japanese by the sight and sound of naval guns and ships larger and more menacing than anything they had seen before; the steamer-sail hybrids (the “black ships”) were novelties to the Japanese whose country had been for centuries deliberately cut off from technical and mechanical progress. The ships could maneuver with frightening speed, a quality that Perry exploited repeatedly to rattle Japanese nerves. His psychological warfare consisted in refusing to compromise on the tiniest detail and creating a personal mystique of inscrutable authority, not even coming out of his cabin to talk to low-ranking Japanese emissaries.

Perry’s view was that as the president’s plenipotentiary he was entitled to the respect due a sovereign; personally offended by the disrespectful treatment meted out by the Japanese to a U. S. commodore sent six years earlier, he insisted on absolute compliance with his demands which he saw as reasonable: "To demand as a right and not to solicit as a favor those acts of courtesy which are due from one civilized nation to another; to allow none of those petty annoyances which have been unsparingly visited upon those who have preceded him." (67) Paradoxically, he also offered “friendship.”

There is high drama and low farce in Feifer’s portrayal of the main episodes of this painful, ambivalent tale: besides the opener already quoted are the intricate negotiations before the first landing, the initial tense violation of Japanese soil by Perry, his troops and a 40 piece orchestra (at which time Perry handed over President Fillmore’s personal letter to the Emperor, offering the same dubious “friend-ship”), Perry’s notorious visits to Okinawa (marked by “pomp” and “insults”), and the final signing of the treaty in which the Japanese abjectly caved in to every demand.
Feifer’s intention however runs deeper than simply retelling the story. He also aims at providing deep cultural and historical contexts for the American intrusion and claims to be the first to have included the Japanese point of view of this event by means of extensive on site research.

Breaking Open Japan indeed provides an impressive picture of the social, economic and historic precedents of Perry’s nonviolent aggression. Some of the topics dealt with are: Japan’s principal encounters with the outside world, starting with the failed invasion by Kublai Khan in the 13th century, Japan’s curious and self-defeating policy of sakoku (seclusion), based on fear and distrust of Christianity (the Japanese believed the religion presaged western conquest), the evolution of the Tokugawa shogunate and Japanese society up to this point, as shaped by sakoku, and the character of Perry’s main adversary, the acting head of the shogunate Abe Masahiro.
Though seemingly forgotten by Japanese today, Lord Abe, as he was known, is built into a major figure in the narrative. The acting shogun being ill and the em-peror old and feeble, the top administrator’s role was magnified in the course of the unprecedented disaster that had beset his nation. Abe knew and worried about Perry’s plans which he had heard about from Dutch informants but accomplished little in the way of preparing defenses against the enemy, his efforts trammeled by warring factions in the feudal power structure. Still, Abe is an appealingly flexible figure, cultured, magnanimous and scholarly, in contrast to the single-minded commodore. Feifer gives him more credit than he does Perry for the nonviolent outcome of the showdown.

Abe’s inaction makes him less dynamic than Perry, but his dilemma in trying to ward off Japanese defeat was perhaps more challenging: “...the threat that colonial domination would follow such defeat -- just look at China cut up by the British [during the Opium Wars] --doubled the foolhardiness of attempting military salva-tion with so inferior a force, which would be worse than betraying Japan’s sacred seclusion.” (135)

Feifer is also good on the “heart of the matter, “ America’s powerful expansionist impulse during this period (of which Perry was perhaps the most singular but not only expression). As the author shows, there was plenty of rationale for “breaking open” Japan : “Americans' individual mixtures of religious. commercial, and patriotic priorities...” [that] “...usually included humanistic ones too: most who thought about it were genuinely convinced Japan would benefit from being lifted into the family of trading nations." (187)

The temper of the times in which these motives developed is well portrayed: the young democracy, fresh from the “conquest of the West” (i. e. California), setting out to compete with European imperialism -- which at that time was greedily dividing up the world (“the conquest of the East”) -- while showing its moral superiority in contemning the excesses of colonialism (as seen in England’s brutal “carving up” of China in the Opium Wars). America’s version of this triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, had just been fashioned, and a burgeoning economy urged expansion to the East; Japan lay precisely on the main route to China, perhaps the main reason for Perry’s mission, as he freely admitted.

A lot of cultural baggage also entered in: vulgar Darwinian racism (that proclaimed the “superiority of the White race”), religious cant (the Japanese were supposed to become aware of their “Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom”!), and an almost messianic belief in the rightness of America’s mission to civilize, enlighten and proselytize the world (echoes of which we sense in certain events going on today in Iraq) and, well, the “breaking open” of Japan became inevitable.
The issue of castaways, shipwrecked sailors whom Japan had treated mercilessly at times, locking them up in cages, also loomed large in American eyes, though Feifer implies that it was trumped up to justify the aggression and name-calling. The corresponding issue of Japanese refugees, refused by the mother country, also was used to exacerbate the situation, though one, the plucky Manjiro, became a key translator in the negotiations.

The essential passion however was not conquest but an optimistic belief in pro-gress, an ideology profoundly alien to late Tokugawa social and political stasis, but which we find still impinges problematically on US foreign policy over a century later.
(note: the order of the last two paras was switched)

The morality of the situation is by no means easy to judge. On the one hand we have the distasteful image of stronger society defeating a weaker, preindustrial one by means of superior mechanical force. The bigger guns won period. On the other, Japan was fortunate to be rid the self-defeating policy of sakoku without too much bloodshed. Had the U. S. abstained, a less scrupulous European powers might well have stepped in. In any case, Perry’s bullying ended Japan’s state of denial con-cerning the rest of the world, and she quickly turned course, instituting the Meiji reforms and becoming a major world naval power in just a few decades.

So perhaps Perry’s visit was of direct, short-term benefit to the Japanese in that it goaded them into quickly becoming a major power, yet the long-term consequences of that militarization could hardly have been desired by the original aggressor.
Hence, in his Afterword, Feifer questions the standard American appraisal of Perry. “Years of asking Americans about Perry,” he writes, “confirmed for me that the vast majority more or less agreed with an admirer who called him ‘the surgeon who operated ... on the suppurating sore of Japanese isolationism.’”(329) Asking Japanese about their opinions, however, (as he did with Japanese historians) produced a different image of Perry. Though the commodore is honored with a statue in Shimoda, some Japanese still resent him (the nonfiring of guns was a form of violence), and point to the some 100 years of unhappy relations between the two countries after the incident to argue against the style and substance of Perry’s intervention. Feifer cites the militaristic Prussian form of government adopted by the Meiji reformers shortly after Perry’s bullying visits as evidence that Perry triggered a basic shift in Japanese society that led to militarism on land and sea and eventually to Pearl Harbor and the War in the Pacific.

In view of this, how smug should Americans feel about Perry’s triumph? It is an important point and one that deserves our attention when our country finds itself involved in several new military adventures in the Middle East that flaunt the same kind of rationale: American cultural and political supremacy.

Feifer concludes that “casting off the destructive myth of the Commodore’s wise and benevolent mission would be a blessing.” (334) This may be difficult for readers who vicariously enjoyed the picture of Japanese pushed around by Perry (I was one of these on the first reading, I must admit), but for other readers with more open minds, Feifer’s points may be more than just wishful thinking.

The author ultimately doesn’t square the circle of these difficult historical and political issues but that’s a minor flaw in a work admirable for its syncretic sympathies, narrative verve and creative history writing. In an age of new imperial out-reach, this book should be required reading for thoughtful Americans who wish to explore a key episode in the history of their nation’s foreign relations with the “Far East.”