9 A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations: The Senzaimaru Voyage to Shanghai of 1862

Abstract

Western scholarship on East Asia has taken note of the Japanese group voyage to the United States in 1860, most prominently in Masao Miyoshi’s study of that mission, to officially ratify the treaty imposed upon their country by Townsend Harris (1804–78) and the government of the United States. Considerably less well known are the Japanese missions to Shanghai of 1862 and 1864, both domestically inspired and both frank admissions in their respective forms that there was a brave new world out there confronting Japan, that Commodore Perry (1794–1863), Townsend Harris, and the United States were only the beginning of an imperialist onslaught, and that as a result Japan had to take a more activist role in its own future by going out to examine the outside world. The future belonged to international trade and diplomacy, and, in a metaphor of a few years later, Japan could join the table at dinner or be served up with the main course. On the Chinese side of things, before the 1880s we know next to nothing of how the Qing government looked upon Japan, soon to become its most important neighbor in every respect. Modern Sino-Japanese relations do not begin with the many thousands of Chinese students flocking to Japanese institutions of higher learning, as significant as that event will be later in the century. Modern Sino-Japanese relations truly commence with voyage of the Senzaimaru from Nagasaki to Shanghai in 1862. The nature of the relationship the Japanese so tentatively sought at the time reads like a blueprint in microcosm for the negotiations that ensued over the next three decades, before war and aggression replaced peaceful diplomacy as the dominant mode of operations.