(this page is the usual collection of bits found while exploring a subject, many digressions and most quite unanticipated when I began... as usual, open-ended working notes)
Steamship Hohattan (stomu furekatto Powhatan)True Portrait of Hiri (Perry)
Marine and Bandsman with samisen
The foreigners said they wanted to take pictures of beautiful Japanese ladies, so the government officials ordered that some of the singing girls be chosen as subjects. Later a rumor spread that anyone who was photographed would die within three years, and the girls worried terribly.
So what do we need to understand here? Certainly something about what Japan was like immediately before its "Opening" (under the Tokugawa Shogunate), and something of how the traditional society was transformed by the Meiji Restoration and its sequels. But before that, the Tokugawa Shogunate needs a bit of explanation. For a teaser, consider this from http://155.33.177.104/ner_wha/technology/feb19.html:
During the sixteenth century, the Japanese gradually adopted matchlocks. They made a number of technical improvements to them, too, using higher quality metal in the barrels, inventing a new kind of trigger spring, and devising a way to cover the matchcord from the rain. [Perrin, 17-18, 67-8] Even so, the shogun Ieyasu perceived that guns threatened not only the fabric of Japan's class structure, but also the authority of the central government. He imposed regulations on gunsmiths that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, effectively choked off the supply of guns in Japan. [Perrin, 62-7]
and from http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/Japanese_Gun_Control.htm:
The historian Noel Perrin offers five reasons why Japan was able to renounce the gun while Europe was not, despite the fierce resistance to guns by the European aristocracy. First, the Samurai warrior nobility, who hated guns, amounted to 6-10 per cent of the population, unlike in Europe, where the noble class never exceeded 1 per cent. The nobility simply counted for more in Japan.[81] Second, Japan was so hard to invade, and the Japanese were such formidable fighters, that swords and bows sufficed for national defense.[82] Invasions were unlikely in any case. One hundred miles separate Japan from Korea; 500 divide Japan and China. Third, writes Perrin, swords were what the Japanese truly valued. Guns depreciated the importance of swords, so a policy of protecting swords by eliminating guns was bound to be popular, at least with the classes who carried swords. Hailed as 'the soul of the samurai', the sword was the physical embodiment of aristocratic honour and of the soul itself.[83] When gun manufacture was still legal, and the Government decided to honour the four leading gunsmiths, it gave them swords.[84] The cult of the sword persisted into the Second World War, when Japanese officers lugged traditional, cumbersome swords into Southeast Asian jungles.[85] Even today, the sword is a common source of Japanese metaphor. Self-indulgent behaviour is called 'the rust of my body', identifying one's body with a sword.[86] The fourth reason Perrin cites for the success in elimination of guns was a general reaction against outside influences, particularly Christianity. Although the firearms made in Japan were the world's best, they remained a symbol of Western technology.[87] Finally, writes Perrin, in a society where aesthetics were prized, swords were valued because they were graceful to use in combat.[88](the book is Perrin, Noel, Giving up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, David R. Godine, Boston, 1979 [DS868.2 .P47])The abolition of firearms and abandonment of military aggression were just one element of the sakoku policy of isolation from the world and exaltation of 'Japaneseness'. The policy worked. Edwin O. Reischauer, America's leading historian of Japan, writes: 'The brawling, bellicose Japanese people of the sixteenth century gradually were transformed into an extremely orderly, even docile people...Nowhere in the world was proper decorum more rigorously observed by all classes, and nowhere else was physical violence less in evidence in ordinary life'.[90] When Commodore Perry and his 'Black Ships' arrived in 1853, Japan was backwards only in technology. An officer in Commodore Perry's fleet reported, 'These people seemed scarcely to know the use of firearms'.[91] Japan had built a more harmonious, peaceful society than any Western nation has before or since.[92]
Tokugawa timeline from NCSU --see the full document, created by John Mertz. A magnificent creation.
Some Tokugawa vocabulary:
The Tokugawa Era: Laying The Foundation for Modern Japan is a good brief summary from Stanford.
"...types of travel authorized by the government in the Edo period... (an elegant page) ...and one on Edo-period food
Tokugawa Ieyasu's central concern was the restoration of peace and order to war-ravaged Japan; in order to accomplish this, he turned to China and Confucianism. In the bakuhan system of government, the bakufu, or military, government of the Tokugawa shogunate reserved the right to inspect the 250 or so autonomous territories, or han under the control of various daimyo.
...but before the Tokugawa era there was more than 60 years of European contact with Japan...
from a Chronology of Japanese history, nicely put together by the creator of an excellent Japan site, some dates and events relevant to early European presence in Japan:
1542: Three Portuguese land at Tanegashima, a small island off the coast of Kyûshû, when their ship is blown off course. When they return to China (from where they had come) they tell other Portuguese about Japan and traders and missionaries begin to arrive a year or two later. Firearms are introduced to Japan when they see those carried by the original Portuguese who had landed on Tanegashima.1549: Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary, arrives in Kagoshima, Kyushu.
Spring 1569: Jesuit missionaries are allowed back in the capital to preach. (By 1582, the estimated number of Christian converts in Japan was 150,000)
1584: A Spanish trading ship, blown off course in a storm, enters Hirado. Because he is jealous of Nagasaki's monopoly with Protuguese traders and he dislikes the Jesuits, Matsuura, the daimyô there, welcomes it and agrees to receive other Spanish traders and non-Jesuit missionaries in Hirado if they wish to come.
July 1587: After returning from Kyûshû, Hideyoshi issues an order officially banning Christianity and expelling Jesuit missionaries from the country (although the order was not energetically enforced).
January 1597: Franciscan missionaries and numerous followers are tortured and crucified. The Jesuits seem to have recovered some of their status with Hideyoshi at the same time, although technically associating with christians was still banned.
1612: Full persecution of the Christian faith recommences.
January 1614: Ieyasu issues an order which suppresses Christianity throughout the country. Churches were destroyed and many missionaries were imprisoned.
1616: Ban on Christianity is reaffirmed. All foreign trade, except Chinese, is retricted to Nagasaki and Hirado.
1636: Ban on Japanese travel abroad. Portuguese traders confined to Deshima Island off Nagasaki.
1639: Portugese traders ousted and Portuguese trading ships banned. Policy of total exclusion implemented (Sakoku Rei).
1640: All members of a Portuguese diplomatic mission from Macao are executed when they arrive in Japan to request a reopening of trade.
1641: Dutch traders moved from Hirado and restricted to Dejima. Chinese restricted to Nagasaki.
(nearly 200 years of isolation...)
1837: American merchant ship (the Morrison) enters Edo Bay but is driven off by gun batteries at Uraga. It goes to Kagoshima and is driven off there as well.
1842: Order to drive off all foreign ships relaxed, allowing ships that are "storm-damaged or shipwrecked, come seeking food, fuel, or water" to enter port.
July 8, 1853: Commodore Perry arrives at Uraga with letter for Shôgun demanding open trade relations for the US. Leaves letter and word that they will return for answer early in 1854 before departing to Okinawa for the winter.
Late 1853/ Early 1854: Bakufu asks opinion of emperor and all daimyô on the issue of what to do about Perry's demands.
February, 1854: Perry returns to Edo. Treaty of Kanagawa signed with United States opening Hakodate and Shimoda to US vessels for provisioning, promise of fair treatment of shipwrecked sailors, extraterritoriality, and approving a future US Consul to live in Shimoda
July 1858 Treaty of Amity & Commerce signed with United States giving free trade at 6 ports, allowing permanent foreign residents in Edo and Ôsaka, and normal trade tariffs. Ii Naosuke, as bakufu regent, approves the treaty unilaterally and against the wishes of a good many of the other daimyô.
from Meiji history, part of Chronology of Japanese History
Change and Continuity in Modern Japan SAKAKIBARA Eisuke (JAPAN ECHO Vol. 24, Special Issue 1997)
The Jinriksha Story from The East (November-December '96)
