During the nineteenth century, Japan’s relationship with the West changed profoundly in a pattern that included sharp antagonism, enthusiastic embrace, selective borrowing, and equality on the international stage. At the time, that changing relationship had implications as well for China, Korea, Russia, and elsewhere, even as it laid the foundation for twentieth century global conflict in World War II.

In the initial decades of the nineteenth century, the Western world was increasingly impinging upon Japan, which had closed itself off from Europe and America since the early seventeenth century with the exception of a small Dutch trading port near Nagasaki. But then a number of Western whaling ships had penetrated Japanese waters, and suspicions rose. Aizawa Seishisai, a prominent Japanese Confucian scholar, gave voice to these worries in 1825:

The barbarians live ten thousand miles across the sea; when they set off on foreign conquests, they must procure supplies and provisions from the enemy. That is why they trade and fish. Their men of war are self-sufficient away from home. If their only motive for harpooning whales was to obtain whale meat, they could do so in their own waters. Why should they risk long, difficult voyages just to harpoon whales in eastern seas? Their ships can be outfitted for trading, or fishing, or fighting. Can anyone guarantee that their merchant vessels and fishing boats of today will not turn into warships tomorrow?1

Notes