To "drive out the barbarians," the nation learned their ways
When Commodore Matthew Perry entered Edo Bay aboard the steam frigate Susquehanna just 130 years ago this summer, most of the awestruck Japanese had never before seen such a vessel, much less a whole flotilla of what they called "the black ships of evil mien."
Deliberately self-isolated for more than two centuries from the upheavals of the "barbarian" outside world, they lived in an almost medieval state. The turmoil of the industrial revolution was all but unknown to them. The shogun's court at Edo received various dispatches from pairs of strong-legged runners, one of whom carried state documents in a lacquered box while the other bore a lantern marked "official business." In imperial Kyoto, the Empress and her ladies followed a custom of blackening their teeth.
Perry presented a White House letter announcing that the U.S. wanted: 1 ) a fueling station for its merchant ships, 2) a commercial treaty permitting free trade, and 3) friendship. If the Japanese did not accede to U.S. terms, he implied, he would impose them by force. The Japanese could hardly ships they had no navy with which to defend themselves. Despite the opposition of the figurehead Emperor, the shogun regime, which actually governed the country, reluctantly signed a series of coerced treaties with five nations from 1854 to 1858. The barbarian merchants and missionaries began moving in.
It was a shocking humiliation.
The full title of the shogun, head of a military oligarchy that had established itself in the 12th century, was "barbarian-subduing generalissimo," and now he had proved helpless. Angry nationalists rallied around the idea of overthrowing the disgraced shogunate and restoring direct rule by the Emperor, descendant of the sun goddess. Their slogan: Sonno-joi (Revere the Emperor! Drive out the barbarians!).
Victorious over the shogun's forces were a group of tribal clans, mostly from the regions of Choshu and Satsuma in southwestern Japan. Young, ambitious, aggressive, these clan leaders had no intention of really restoring imperial rule, and they themselves were to govern as a new oligarchy for the next half-century. To symbolize the change, though, they decided to move the young Emperor, Mutsuhito, out of Kyoto and into the shogun's castle at Edo, which they renamed "eastern capital": Tokyo. A British infantry unit, on guard in a new European settlement, piped the Emperor to his new home to the tune of The British Grenadiers. The Emperor took for his reign the name Meiji (enlightened rule), and so in 1868 began the Meiji Restoration. It dedicated itself to the overnight transformation of a feudal anachronism into a world power.