Written by Todd DePastino
On July 9, 1853, four American warships steamed into Edo Bay, their guns pointed at the seat of Japan’s ruling shogunate. At their helm was Commodore Matthew Perry, a veteran of the US Navy and younger brother of War of 1812 hero Oliver Hazard Perry. He came with a letter from President Millard Fillmore and an ultimatum: open your ports to American trade, or we’ll open them for you with our 73 state-of-the-art exploding-shell guns.
The Japanese called them the kurofune, the “Black Ships.” The name stuck and is still used today to refer to anything presaging momentous change and disruption. In 1853, it signaled how foreign intrusion ended one age and opened up another. In under a generation, Japan would go from feudal backwater to industrial powerhouse. And in less than a century, the descendants of those stunned samurai who watched Perry’s ships would launch their own fleet across the Pacific, into the heart of the American Empire at Pearl Harbor.
To appreciate the shock of the Black Ships, you have to understand the Japan they were sailing into.
For more than two centuries before 1853, Japan had been sealed off from the world. The Tokugawa shogunate, a loose confederation of 300 semi-independent fiefdoms ruled by regional warlords called daimyo, enforced a strict policy of isolation. Foreign trade was outlawed (except for a trickle through the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki), Christianity was banned, and no Japanese citizen was permitted to leave the country on pain of death.
Technologically, Japan had missed out on the revolutions that had transformed the West. It had no steam power, no railroads, no telegraph lines, no industrial machinery. Power rested not with the emperor but with the shogun, elected by the daimyo, and backed by a warrior class of samurai. It was a medieval society organized around land, lineage, and the sword.
Mtthew Perry’s expedition changed all that. Demanding to speak only to high-ranking officials (he wrongly assumed the largely symbolic emperor held real authority), he delivered President Fillmore’s letter with a not-so-veiled threat of war. He made clear that he would return the next year, expecting an answer.
When he did, in 1854, with a larger fleet of eight ships, Japan’s shogunate conceded and opened two ports to American vessels. Thet also established an American consulate. Japan’s long history of isolation came to an end.
Perry’s arrival divided Japan’s 300 daimyo. Some wanted to resist foreign influence. Others saw modernization as the only path to survival. After a decade of Civil War, the modernizers won, overthrew the shogunate had been overthrown, and installed a new emperor with real power. The so-called Meiji Restoration swept aside 800 years of samurai government and set Japan on a furious course of Westernization.
Western dress replaced kimonos. The samurai class was abolished. A new conscript army was formed, railroads were laid, telegraph lines were strung, and cities were built. The Meiji Charter Oath of 1868 promised deliberative government, class mobility, economic innovation, and above all the accumulation of technical know-how. “Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world” became Japan’s supreme commandment.
Japan had decided: if we can’t beat ‘em, we’ll join ‘em.
Joining the West meant building a Western-style empire of overseas colonies. Industrialization required enormous amounts of raw materials like coal and iron that Japan didn’t possess. And so, with modern ships and Western tactics, Japan turned outward to grasp the resources needed to compete on a global stage.
In 1894, it defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War, claiming Korea and Taiwan. A decade later, it shocked the world by trouncing Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, the first time in modern history an Asian power had defeated a European one.
After its victories over China and Russia, the Western powers forced Japan to return some of its spoils. The Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt, won the President a Nobel Prize for Peace but instilled a burning resentment in Japan. The game of empire, Japan learned, came with double standards. As the Japanese conceived it, the West had taught Japan to play the game. Then, when Japan began winning, declared the game immoral.
By the 1930s, Japan’s industrial economy had grown into a war machine. Its navy rivaled Britain’s, and its ambitions stretched across Asia. And standing in the way was the United States, which had been gathering its own Pacific empire since the Spanish-American War.
In 1941, nearly 90 years after the Black Ships steamed into Edo Bay, Japanese carriers struck Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack was meant to knock out America’s Pacific fleet before it could challenge Japanese expansion. It was the latest chapter in a story that began with Mattherw Perry’s Black Ships of 1853.
