The Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 and the Harris Treaty in 1858 opened six ports to American trade, granted extraterritoriality to American citizens on Japanese soil, set fixed low tariffs on American goods, and obliged the Japanese government to rescue shipwrecked American sailors. The Tokugawa government, facing modern steamships with Renaissance-era weaponry, had no choice but to submit to the demands of the United States. Second, much closer to home was the arrival of Commodore Perry and his fleet of American gunboats in 1853. The Netherlands unsubtly warned the Shogunate in 1844 that continued isolationism might subject Japan to a similar fate.
These conflicts resulted in a series of unequal treaties with various Western powers which imposed treaty ports, extraterritoriality for Westerners, fixed tariffs on Western goods, and the ceding of Hong Kong to the British Empire. First was the humiliation of the regional hegemon – China – after the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s. These small incidents, although worrisome for the Tokugawa Shogunate, paled in comparison to the traumatic encounters with the West a few decades later. Furthermore, in 1808 the British HMS Phaeton arrived in Nagasaki, fired warning shots at local vessels, and demanded supplies under threat of bombardment.
In the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the eastward-bound Russian Empire aggressively probed the northern islands of Japan, although their many requests for commerce were refused. By the nineteenth century, these contacts became more ominous – and then morphed into an existential threat to the Japanese nation. The country’s early encounters with the West were mostly benign a minor trading relationship with the Dutch had existed since the mid-1600s and there was a moderate level of interest amongst Japanese elites in Western science and technology, known as ‘Rangaku’ (‘Dutch Studies’). While it is true that Japan had become a more urbanized and commercialised society over the course of Tokugawa rule (much to the chagrin of the traditional Samurai warrior elite), the country that Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ found in 1853 was remarkably similar to Japan on the eve of Sekigahara – feudal, pre-industrial and suspicious. Ever since the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 which heralded the Tokugawa clan’s dominion over the country, Japan had been artificially cut off from the outer world under the ‘Sakoku’ policy of national seclusion. True isolation was not possible for any country during the age of imperialism, although few tried harder than Japan under Shogunate rule.