Collision at Namamugi

Abstract

FROM THE BEGINNING OF the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Japan preserved a careful isolation from most of the world. During this time the emperor, who resided in the ancient capital of Kyoto, retained little power, ruling in name only through the centralized bureaucracy of the shogunate in Edo (present-day Tokyo). The shogunate was occupied by successive members of the Tokugawa, the largest landholding and most powerful military family. Tied to it in varying degrees of closeness, some 250 lords governed the local affairs of their domains in semi-autonomy. By the 1830s and 1840s, some domains had begun to challenge the control of the shogunate because of economic and political problems. In the midst of these unsettled conditions, in 1853, the American commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived with a squadron of warships to demand that Japan open up to foreign commerce and establish normal diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. Faced with the military superiority of the West and hoping to buy time, the shogunate agreed to a series of treaties with the United States, GreatBritain, Russia, and Holland. In response to the threat of Western incursion, afew powerful outside domains such as Satsuma, which had been excluded from the inner circle of bureaucratic power, joined the domainal opposition to the shogunate and allied with the imperial court. In 1868 these forces overthrew the shogunate and restored the emperor to power.