The Japanese do not easily give up a notion once they get it in their heads. Last week they had quite a shock to discover that a 90-year-old notion was no longer true.
When Congress decided, in 1851, that the Japanese should be persuaded to open their ports to U. S. trade, old Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry was picked to persuade them. He had spent, as it happened, two long years reading travelers' tales—which convinced him that the whole object of Japanese ceremony was to wring from the opposite party a sense of affectionate...
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