New Naval Powers: Japan and the United States

Abstract

As the closing years of the nineteenth century gave way to the first decade of the twentieth, it would have been reasonable to describe Japan as a new naval power. From the early thirteenth to the late sixteenth centuries, not only did the Japanese ships that carried Japanese warriors into battle against Chinese and Koreans and Mongols belong to the pre-naval era, but they had no successors. In the 1630s, Japan had followed the Chinese example and turned her back on the outside world. The occasional trading ship from Portugal or, later, from the Netherlands might still be licensed, but otherwise seaborne trade and foreign contacts were successfully discouraged. In 1635 all Japanese were even forbidden to leave the country and the building of ocean-going ships was prohibited.3 In the early nineteenth century, reports of foreign depredations in China reinforced the Japanese view that evil communications corrupt good manners. An American naval visit to Yedo Bay in 1846 elicited only a statement of Japanese reasons for declining intercourse with foreigners.