The American coolie ship Robert Bowne had been on her way from Amoy to California or Peru for ten days when the 410 Chinese laborers on board mutinied on March 30, 1852. Abusing the coolies and throwing several of them overboard, the crew had stirred a violent uprising that killed the captain, two officers, and four sailors, and left five of the coolies dead in battle.Footnote ¹ The mutineers took possession of the vessel and ordered the remaining crew to navigate until they met with land five days later at Ishigaki, a western outpost of the Japanese vassal kingdom of Ryukyu.Footnote ² Most coolies had disembarked by the time the remaining crew members regained control of the vessel and steered back to China. Back in Amoy, the crew reported the incident and demanded prosecution of the mutineers. US consul Charles W. Bradley requested the support of the British brigs Lily and Contest, which readily steered to Ishigaki to prosecute the fugitive coolies.Footnote ³ While transpacific coolie trade was developing quickly in the hands of American shipowners, the British were still the chief human traffickers out of China at that time, and were therefore interested in ready assertion of Western business interests vis-à-vis the Qing state.Footnote ⁴ After a raid by hundreds of armed soldiers at Ishigaki, the British delivered seventeen captives to the Chinese authorities for trial, while several hundred coolies continued to hide out in the hills. Quickly, a conflict between Qing China, to whose territory Ishigaki was mistakenly counted, and the United States that claimed jurisdiction on the “high seas,” developed into a multilateral confrontation that sprawled to the court of the Ryukyuan king and his Japanese overlords in Kagoshima.Footnote ⁵

The ambiguous status of Ryukyu put the kingdom at the forefront of a decades-long geopolitical transformation that would culminate in the political “opening” of Japan. Since the invasion by Satsuma domain in 1609, the island kingdom figured as a Japanese puppet state and diplomatic proxy for trade and communication with China, but Western navies primarily perceived the islands’ tributary relationship with the Qing as an extension of continental power. Japan, after all, was thought to be hermetic. Even under Satsuma rule, Ryukyu practiced largely independent maritime policies, as the coming and going of foreign vessels at Naha and the frequent landing of whalers in more remote islands over the 1830 and 40s illustrate.Footnote ⁶ Increasingly dense traffic along the Kuroshio route across Ryukyu and along Japan’s southern shores increased the potential for maritime conflict. International traffic and the state violence it drew after itself involved Japan’s maritime periphery into conflicts over repatriation, prosecution, and questions of maritime jurisdiction.Footnote ⁷ It is in these inconspicuous locations along the Kuroshio highway, islands like Ishigaki, Aguni, and Iheya, that the story of Japan’s political “opening” should really begin.

The smoking stacks of Commodore M. C. Perry’s black ships at Uraga in the summer of 1853 doubtlessly triggered turmoil among Japanese commoners and leaders, but it did not come unexpectedly, as the commodore’s visit stood in a series of Western naval approaches. “Perry’s arrival came as a shock,” writes David Howell, “but it was the shock of an earthquake to people living on a fault.”Footnote ⁸ Not only had the scenario of naval incursions on the very capital materialized four times already since 1837, the shogunate had been improving the defense of the capital systematically since 1845. James Biddle’s USS Columbus and Vincennes, which entered Edo Bay in 1846 weighed down by over one hundred cannons, had particularly alerted the authorities.Footnote ⁹ Of course, Perry’s stopover at Naha en route to Edo was readily communicated to the shogunal capital by a Satsuma speed missive. The notification that the American squadron was taking course on Edo by way of the Bonin Islands reached the senior council in Edo on May 26, 1853, at over a month’s notice from Perry’s arrival.Footnote ¹⁰

This chapter reevaluates the geography and timeline of the so-called “opening” of Japan from a maritime perspective. Over the 1850s, the offshore was transformed from a topography of illicit mingling between fisherfolk and foreign whalers described in Chapter 4 into an infrastructure of state-led and steam-powered naval access along the eastbound Kuroshio route. Technological change originating in distant countries occupies a prominent role in this process, yet even as steam came to power navigation, currents, and winds continued to shape time and place of naval engagement. In the aftermath of the California Gold Rush of 1848, thousands of laborers or “coolies” were ferried yearly from Chinese treaty ports to construction sites and mines in the Americas, along the Japanese coasts. The expansion of transpacific traffic and the emergence of steam-powered navigation directed new naval interests to the region, centered on the construction of coaling infrastructure and the expansion of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Granting protection to stranded whalers was a credible legitimation for American interest in Japan, but the desire to source coal from the region for the creation of transpacific steam routes, which the US Congress had been planning since 1848, was of greater political interest.Footnote ¹¹ With Perry’s encouragement, American businessmen in China amplified their calls on US government to also appropriate Taiwan and its coal deposits “in the interest of humanity and commerce,” or to purchase it for ten million dollars, a demand, however, that ebbed off with the opening of Taiwanese harbors in 1860.Footnote ¹² Though the Japanese could fend off whalers letting them restock water and foodstuff in peripheral islands once the infamous Shell-Repel edict had been revoked in 1842, the steam-powered navies that followed in their wake were determined to seize access to naval infrastructure on shore.

These developments were observed with consternation in the maritime capital of Edo. While defense reforms over the preceding years had focused on improving harbor fortifications, shogunal advisers warned that the city’s maritime supply routes – traveled by around 7,500 vessels yearly – remained poorly protected against naval attacks.Footnote ¹³ In the following, we will see how this plight prompted organizational and strategic reforms of a fragmented defense system. Shogunal and domain leaders sought to reclaim control of its offshore space by building essential naval capacities. The subsequent appropriation and reverse engineering of foreign technologies unfolded as a domestic race between domain navies that brought about makeshift steamboats and a series of knockoff schooners, pirated from Russian plans. Even though the shogunate’s efforts to build a national naval power failed eventually, Japan’s strategic reorientation of the 1850s was a dynamic process, powered by decentralized actors – in which the arrival of American black ships was just another episode.

Hydrography of the Kuroshio Highway

Despite the emergence of steam-powered navigation, the routes of transpacific traffic at mid-century remained structured by winds and currents. The opening of Chinese treaty ports, codified for Americans in 1844, and the American annexation of California in 1848 put Japan in the middle of a transpacific highway. In the mid nineteenth century, both sailing vessels and steamboats plying the Pacific had to choose their routes in consideration of winds and currents. With lieutenant Matthew F. Maury’s compilation of whalers’ observations of the oceans’ movements into comprehensive charts of the Pacific, by mid-century, sailors were navigating an intricate maritime topography of currents and winds.Footnote ¹⁴ Ships traveling west by way of the Marquesas or Hawaiʻi took advantage of the propulsion by easterly trade winds and the westbound north or south equatorial currents, whereas the eastbound journey from Asia to the Americas had to avoid these equatorial phenomena. As Alexander Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas of 1850 tells, coolie ships bound for Chile and Peru could choose to cross the South China Sea, pass the Sunda Strait and sail into the circumpolar current South of Australia to reach South America.Footnote ¹⁵ More direct, however, was the Japan route. “On the voyage from India to South America,” Johnston wrote, “which is generally made during the south-west monsoon, ships keep to the north of the limits of the north-east trade-wind, which is usually met with only in latitude 28° and 29° north”Footnote ¹⁶ – across the Tokara Strait between Satsuma and Ryukyu. The trading and coolie ships that connected Canton and Shanghai to the Americas then followed a route just a few degrees south of the Japanese coasts.

Maritime drift was a significant factor for navigation at mid-century, with or without steam propulsion. Johnston’s map of the Pacific shows the Kuroshio as a maritime highway for eastbound voyages, whereas westward sailing went by way of the North Equatorial Circulation. From Canton to Port Jackson (near Sydney), the route followed the Kuroshio as far as 175° eastern longitude, to turn sharp south to Fiji, minimizing deflection by easterly winds and currents in tropical latitudes (see Figure 5.1). Though sailing upwind was possible to a certain degree, opposed currents could significantly delay a voyage. Speeds of up to 250 cm/s are observed in some stretches of the Kuroshio, and speeds of up to 100 cm/s prevail in the North Equatorial Current.Footnote ¹⁷ Oceanographer Silas Bent reported that in 1848, “bound from Hong Kong to Japan, we struggled for three days, after leaving port against this south-westerly current, without making a single mile on our course to the eastward.”Footnote ¹⁸ Conversely, taking advantage of maritime currents could significantly accelerate navigation. In fact, it had been observed that Chinese sailors avoided struggling with southward currents in the Formosa strait and sometimes took a detour east of Formosa and sailed north in the Kuroshio.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1874, American diplomat Charles LeGendre’s map of Taiwan recommended the route to Japan along the Kuroshio east of the island, noting that the current there flows at “20 to 40 miles per day.”Footnote ²⁰ As transpacific traffic volumes grew in the mid nineteenth century, eastward travelers plying the fluid topography of the East Asian seas were likely to choose the path of the Kuroshio and travel across the Ryūkyūs and along the coasts of “secluded” Japan.

Figure 5.1 Revised edition of Johnston’s map of the Pacific Ocean and its maritime currents of 1855 (detail). Note the markup for equatorial westbound routes (solid lines) and eastbound routes (dotted lines) following the northerly path of the Kuroshio or “Japan Current.” (Physical Chart of the Pacific Ocean, in: UC Berkeley, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Acc. No.: 0372.015.)

The Law of the Stronger on the High Seas

It had happened more frequently over the previous decade that foreign sailors landed in Ryukyu and Japan distressed or in pursuit of trade, but the violence demonstrated in the aftermath of the Robert Bowne mutiny of 1852 evidenced a new, frightening escalation at the hands of British and American navies. Shimazu Nariakira, the ruler of Satsuma domain and overlord of Ryukyu, informed the shogunate that the incident in Ishigaki was by no means the first intrusion, but that the Ryūkyūs were approached at least three times over the preceding half a year – as far as reported – by foreigners who “appeared exhausted and were therefore given porridge and hard vegetables.”Footnote ²¹ Logbooks of whaling vessels suggest that, since the abrogation of the Shell-Repel edict in 1842, informal landings in the Ryūkyūs happened frequently and deliberately with the intention to restock on foodstuff. With the Robert Bowne incident, however, it became clear that such peaceful encounters were but the harbingers of much cruder imperial interests in the high seas.

Shimazu’s speed missive to the shogunate reported that the 405 Chinese aboard the vessel had left their homes in Fujian province due to a drought and intended to “move to England and make a living there.” During the voyage, they explained, they met bad winds and drifted to Ishigaki.Footnote ²² The coolies at first disguised their true predicament in front of the local authorities, causing a great surprise when the British gunboat Lily approached some three weeks later, opening fire on the refugee camps the local administrators had set up for the castaways. The situation escalated when about 200 armed soldiers disembarked:

With the support of HMS Contest, which joined the site two days later, the raids lasted a week and killed at least forty coolies but resulted in the arrest of a mere five, the others having fled into the “jungle.”Footnote ²⁴ Ten days after the British had given up the chase, on May 22nd, the East India Squadron’s sloop-of-war USS Saratoga appeared off Ishigaki and landed approximately 100 men. By the end of the month, they had captured between fifty and sixty coolies with which they sailed back to Amoy.Footnote ²⁵

The presence of these prosecuted individuals had turned into a hazard. Shimazu had immediately forwarded the Ryukyuan request that the coolies be brought away as soon as possible to avoid renewed incursions, but one year after the incident, district magistrate Miyara Tōsō of Ishigaki reported that 270 Chinese refugees still burdened the local population. Miyara asked that they be returned to China at the expense of the Ryukyuan king.Footnote ²⁶ One Chinese official in Fujian later remarked that “as the tyranny of the English barbarians was extraordinary, the prince of the said country [Ryukyu] greatly feared that if they were not delivered up immediately, the barbarian ships would return, make an exhaustive search, and give rise to trouble.”Footnote ²⁷ But by that time, the islands of Ryukyu had already become entangled tightly with the competition of imperial interests of Western and Asian powers over jurisdiction on the high seas.

Ignorant about Ryukyu’s political status, the American Envoy in Canton, Peter Parker, insisted that “had the piracy been committed within the jurisdiction of China, the 21st article of the treaty would consign the pirates to the government of China, but occurring upon the high seas and under the flag of the United States, strictly speaking, it comes under the exclusive cognizance of the laws of the United States.”Footnote ²⁸ Yet since US authorities tried to keep their protection of human traffickers discrete and expected harsher punishment according to Chinese practice, Parker extradited the captive coolies to a Qing court. The coolie trade, resembling the practices of Atlantic slave trade in many regards, had come under sharp criticism in China and the West. The conditions aboard were so abusive that four out of seven coolie voyages to the Americas in 1850 encountered incidents of mutiny, while others suffered passenger mortality rates around one-third – in one documented case even two-thirds – by the time the ships reached their destinations.Footnote ²⁹ The Qing court, however, acquitted the mutineers and started an investigation instead against those who swindled the coolies into coming aboard in the first place.Footnote ³⁰ The subsequent diplomatic showdown between the two empires exposed systematic abuse on the part of coolie traders and triggered the outbreak of violent riots in Amoy in the fall of 1852 that, however, did little harm to the bustling business of human trafficking along the Kuroshio route.Footnote ³¹

In Europe, early modern legal debates had brought about ideas of the seas as a space without rulers other than the “natural law,” but as Lauren Benton has shown, both policing and mapping of maritime space were centered on “a thickening network of imagined corridors [that] produced distinctive regional regulatory spheres.”Footnote ³² Land-borne polities exerted significant influence on the creation of these maritime spheres by creating a balance of blackmail that expanded their legal influence over the ocean. As Adam Clulow finds, the Tokugawa shogunate fared well, too, by pressuring the Dutch VOC into complying and even performing services amidst an intentionally vague maritime jurisdiction, “without the vast expenditure and technological challenges involved in maintaining a fleet.”Footnote ³³ By the early nineteenth century, maritime jurisdiction was perceived in Europe according to the principle that “territorial rule ends where the power of weapons ends”Footnote ³⁴ – a distance that has been recognized to count for about three miles from the shore. While no correspondence was held with Ryukyuan officials regarding American claims to the jurisdiction of the “high seas,” which US Consul Peter Parker had cited so insistently vis-à-vis Qing officials, the Robert Bowne incident abruptly showed that conflicts between third parties offshore could end with violent action on Ryukyuan or Japanese territory.

Abe Masahiro and the Defense Patchwork

By the time they learned about the Robert Bowne incident, the shogunal authorities had spent years expediting projects to improve maritime defenses. Since the appointment of twenty-six-year old Abe Masahiro to the supreme position of Chief Senior Councilor in 1845 and his assumption of the self-instituted position of Coastal Defense Officer, naval preparedness had entered top executive levels.Footnote ³⁵ In particular, Abe was bracing for advances on Edo Bay. As Noell Wilson writes, the Senior Councilor “was crafting Uraga as an indispensable defensive and diplomatic portal – adding a fifth ‘guchi’ to Arano’s four-site rubric (of Matsumae, Tsushima, Nagasaki, and the Ryūkyūs) – a new ‘gateway’ on par with that of Nagasaki.”Footnote ³⁶ Since 1843, the Uraga magistrate permanently had a Dutch translator at his disposition, and in 1849, Abe granted the magistrate the authority to negotiate with foreign vessels in order to effectuate a timely departure. Under Abe, naval preparations around the capital gained further urgency when James Biddle’s USS Columbus attempted to enter Edo Bay in 1846.Footnote ³⁷ In response to additional attempted landings in the Gotō islands, Ezo, and the northeast, Abe asked Saga domain to build a series of Western-style batteira vessels, robust enough to transport a howitzer, a project the domain had begun to prepare in 1840 already – in the course even attempting to build a three-masted sloop.Footnote ³⁸

For financial and legal reasons, the strategy continued to center on the defense of strategic harbors from shore-borne batteries. As the shogunal archivist Shibukawa Rokuzō argued:

Rather than chasing after the foreign ways, Shibukawa believed, Japan should perfect original and age-proven strategies, centered on harbor defense.

However, advisers in the entourage of shogunal intendant Egawa Tarōzaemon raised criticism of this harbor-centric approach to naval defense. As discussed in Chapter 4, Egawa’s advisers Chōei and Kazan had stepped up their polemic by cautioning about invasion scenarios in the aftermath of the Morrison incident of 1837, and also Egawa himself urged the creation of seaborne means of defense. In early 1839, he was assigned to assist City Magistrate Torii Yōzō in surveying Edo Bay, despite Torii’s lower rank. Yōzō had a reportedly difficult character, and it is believed that a clash between the men eventually led to the purge of Egawa’s advisers.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet the two had to continue their collaboration until Yōzō’s fall from power in 1844.

News of the Opium War, which had ended in 1842 with a shattering defeat for the Qing empire, informed the scenarios of naval war Japanese leaders reckoned with. In a decisive move, the British had deployed five steamboats and eleven sailing vessels up the Yangzi river and blocked the Grand Canal that connected China’s southern granaries to the northern capital.Footnote ⁴¹ Vernacular accounts circulated how the British “first seized strategic positions from the Qing and with those as a foothold, used the power of wind and currents over thousands of miles of coasts to rob in the morning and menace at night; or they stole rice and grain from the cargo vessels at sea en route to Beijing, in order to exhaust the soldiers of that country.”Footnote ⁴² Such narratives were received with fear and fascination among the Japanese public. One graphic novel titled Kaigai Shinwa, or “News from Overseas,” which originally circulated in a small run of only about fifty copies, within a few months drew book-length responses from commoners debating about naval defense. Since the novel spread concerns about Japan’s naval preparedness, it circulated for just a few months before censorship struck down on the author Mineta Fūkō and his publisher. But soon, an unknown group of activists reprinted his novelistic warnings in a much greater run.Footnote ⁴³ Though Fūkō was imprisoned and later banished from Edo, his narrative of the British naval onslaught continued to circulate and was cited by prominent intellectuals such as Sakuma Shōzan and his student Yoshida Shōin, as Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi has found.Footnote ⁴⁴

Perhaps Egawa Tarōzaemon had studied the outcome of naval warfare in China based on similar accounts. The intendant pointed out repeatedly that while overall military preparedness was high, the scenario of an attack on the maritime supply routes to Edo posed a major risk. In a report to the shogunate probably dating to that period, Egawa wrote:

Unlike earlier defense strategies for Edo Bay, inspired at Nagasaki’s harbor defenses, Egawa’s assessment emphasized the importance of shipborne defense of maritime supply routes. The power of steam engines was immediately recognized as a key component of naval modernization, but opponents cited fears that large gunboats would be mistaken as invaders and cause turmoil. But whatever the appearance, constructing solid hulls and designing versatile rigging seemed essential to patrolling the maritime highway.

The Toukugawa security architecture, which descended from a quasi-feudal regime set up at Ieyasu’s time, was a highly cost-effective system in which military services and infrastructure duties were performed in the manner of corvée labor. Programs to step up military preparedness along the shores put pressure on the local domain’s finances, as one assistant remarked: “[W]e must not allow that the coastal domains become exhausted and their livelihood cut off.”Footnote ⁴⁶ But under the given circumstances, creating a more centralized defense system with straight command lines into the domains was a daunting task. The new naval challenges in fact led to a situation in which the domains performed defense duties at the order of the Tokugawa for payment, as Noell Wilson has shown, a fact that further eroded the shogunate’s authority when foreign pressure mounted in the 1850s and 1860s. This gradually undermined shogunal finances and authority in a manner that would ultimately hamper attempts to centralize military power and weaken the regime fatally.Footnote ⁴⁷

Chief Senior Councilor Abe Masahiro chose a strategy of incorporation and cohesion that would remain his signature. The involvement of remote and traditionally less-trusted tozama daimyo such as Nabeshima Naomasa of Saga domain into the new defense exigencies granted access to technological achievements financed by the domains, but the act also caused concerns about a loss of authority for the shogunate.Footnote ⁴⁸ In fact, as Wilson shows, a shift of military power toward the domains had been ongoing since the shogunate had begun paying for domainal defense services in Ezo.Footnote ⁴⁹ Productive collaboration with certain key domains did not change the fact that the political entities of Japan were acting independently and in competition with each other. The ascent of Saga domain’s Nabeshima Naomasa into a key position for naval defense, for example, granted access to his domain’s technological achievements, such as high-quality cannons forged for Edo batteries at his reverberatory furnaces in 1855, or the steam power technology developed by Tanaka Hisashige in the same year.Footnote ⁵⁰

Other domains, meanwhile, understood themselves as competing against the shogunate and among each other. Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma domain had given the order to translate Gideon Jan Verdam’s Volledige verhandeling over de stoomwerktuigen, a Dutch work dating to 1837 that represented the state of the art of steam engine technology at its time. Completed in 1849, Mitsukuri Genpo’s translation provided the blueprint for the reverse engineering of a steam engine at the Satsuma domain residence in Edo. The engine was installed on a solid hull designed by Manjirō in 1855. After four years of trial and error, Japan’s first steamboat reached merely two to three rather than the planned twelve horse powers but the prototypical success is astounding regardless.Footnote ⁵¹ Most tellingly, with Satsuma and Chōshū, the most fierce competitors over defense technologies were those domains that would ultimately confront the shogunate and claim leadership in the construction of a new political order after 1868. By the time of the perplexing approach of Perry’s four large steamboats to the harbor of Uraga in 1853, steam engines were by no means unknown in Japan, but it was not granted that imitating the appallingly expensive technology would be the most effective way to enhance naval strength (see Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 Popular representation of a steamboat (ca. 1854). The text reads: “The steamboat, also known as ‘fire wheel boat’ is a vessel originally used in Europe and other regions, but in our age, it is told, [the technology] has spread to America, where they are being built [as well]. As they run, these vessels cover thirty ri [118 km] per hour, that makes three hundred sixty ri [1416 km] in one day and a night, regardless of wind, rain, and opposed waves. Once they depart, they ply the oceans like dragons!” Jōki karin sen no zu, in: NDL, Acc. No. gai-ni-92.

The Geopolitics of Steam Navigation

Perry’s squadron eventually arrived at the entrance of Edo Bay on July 8, 1853, breaking it to the general public that Japan was at the center of a geopolitical transformation that would bring about major change. Perry approached the harbor of Uraga from the southeast under steam to make it appear as though his fleet had crossed the entire Pacific straight from California, a stretch, he claimed, American steamships could cover in merely eighteen days.Footnote ⁵² Of course, the shogunate was informed about his true route across the Atlantic and around Africa, along a chain of British coaling stations that led to East Asia through the strait of Melaka.Footnote ⁵³ As Perry wrote in his report, his fleet burned between twenty-six and thirty-six tons daily, at an approximate cost of $800 per ship, necessitating it for the fleet to travel by wind whenever traveling out of view from major harbors.Footnote ⁵⁴ The very fact that Britain was in control of coaling stations all along the eastward routes from the Atlantic to East Asia underlines the significance of Perry’s mission. The coaling stations Perry intended to install for American navigation would facilitate steam-powered access to Asia by way of the North Pacific.

Steam-powered shipping had emerged in the 1810s chiefly to propel river shipping, but by the 1820s, steam technologies were used along some coastal routes at sea. The technology brought about major changes to infrastructural requirements for both riverine and maritime shipping.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the Pacific, steam navigation had first become commercialized with the founding of the British-financed Pacific Steam Navigation Company (PSNC) that started operating a steam-powered mail line along the Chilean coast around 1840.Footnote ⁵⁶ Though costly and financially risky, such enterprises served a strategic purpose as they facilitated transport and communication according to a regular, environmentally independent schedule, particularly in regions dominated by seasonal wind patterns or strong currents, such as in the Humboldt Current off western South America. Alexander Keith Johnston, author of The Physical Atlas cited in Figure 5.1, having traveled on the PSNC line at some point in the 1840s, reported that the trip from Guayaquil to Lima against the current, which on average took twenty-five days, could now be traveled in a mere five days.Footnote ⁵⁷ The benefit of sailing according to exacting schedules in defiance of seasonal winds and weather only outweighed the cost of coal on certain stretches. Steamboats provided a particular military advantage on rivers. In China, British and American steamboats began operating coastal steamer lines in the mid-1840s, but commercial oceangoing voyages remained chiefly wind-powered for decades thereafter.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was not until 1871 that the British navy commissioned their first mastless and exclusively steam-powered warship, and until the close of the century, developing an empire-wide network of coaling stations remained an essential security task for the British navy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Steamboats remained closely tied to this coastal infrastructure, a factor that sharply reduced their scope of operation.

Steam-powered access to East Asia was chiefly a race between Britain and the United States. The British Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company extended its regular route network from London as far as Hong Kong in 1845, and to Shanghai in 1850.Footnote ⁶⁰ From their inception, American plans for transpacific steam routes stood in the sign of out-speeding the routes controlled by Britain.Footnote ⁶¹ Accordingly, projects to establish steam-powered routes across the Pacific had been in discussion in the US Congress since 1848. Based on reports of abundant coal deposits of high quality in Japan, Perry had high expectations for the coal he could stock at Japanese ports.Footnote ⁶²

The fierce competition between the British and American navies also evolved around the exploration of local coal resources. Since the late 1830s, Borneo had been at the focus of coal exploration for both empires, but by the 1840s, the scope of the race had broadened.Footnote ⁶³ The discovery of “heavy, brilliant” coal, “easily ignited & burning with a bituminous gassy flame”Footnote ⁶⁴ by a naval expedition to northern Taiwan shifted the quest for fossil fuels north. Subsequently, Gideon Nye, a businessman and later US Consul in Macao, feared that the island’s coal resources may motivate a British occupation, so he urged the United States in 1857 to appropriate or purchase the island from Qing China.Footnote ⁶⁵ This suggestion remained unanswered, however, as the focus of coal exploration in East Asia was shifting to Japan.

Like ore, petroleum, and other natural resources, coal is manyfold in quality and value. Accessibility and availability of labor in the vicinity of coal fields was just as central, since coal mining, more so than petroleum drilling, is labor intensive and prone to strikes or infrastructure failure.Footnote ⁶⁶ The properties of coal from different locations varied greatly in caloric value, storability, and cleanliness – the clearer the smoke, the later a ship was detected, and the higher the caloric value, the better the fleet’s performance.Footnote ⁶⁷ Since the allocation of coal over vast distances was costly, labor intensive, and exposed to disruption, appropriating local coal resources was front and center in Perry’s mission. It had been known from Kaempfer’s and Siebold’s reports that the Japanese mined coal at a considerable scale, but the Japanese were reluctant to reveal its true quality to the Americans, intentionally presenting them with low quality coal, as Perry suspected:Footnote ⁶⁸

The Japanese had indeed mined and burned fossil coal long before the emergence of steam engines. Fossil energy was used for industrial purposes, though without the use of steam engines or other mechanical translations of heat into movement. Chiefly, fossil energy was used to boil down sea salt, to heat homes, and for proto-industrial practices such as trying out whale blubber.Footnote ⁷⁰ The western provinces of Hizen, Chikuzen, and Nagato were famously rich in coal fields, and they mined substantial quantities of it long before the advent of steam technology.Footnote ⁷¹ In the Meiji Period, the old reputation of Japanese coal would prove true: The sinking of the Takashima coal mine in Hizen province under an Anglo–Japanese joint venture in 1866 boosted Japanese coal exports, and by the 1880s, Japanese coal became the preferred type among navies cruising Asian waters (see Figure 5.3).Footnote ⁷²

Figure 5.3 Map showing the major coal fields of Japan. Compiled based on Coal Resources of the World, in: RUM, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Acc. No.: 2249.019.

The quest for coaling infrastructure also turned a spotlight on more remote places along the Kuroshio route. Besides the common route south of Honshu, alternative routes for steamboats were planned to lead across the Tsushima strait to Hakodate – the Gibraltar of Japan, as Perry wrote – and the Aleutians before turning south along the American coast.Footnote ⁷³ On his way to Japan, the commodore had prepared deposits for up to 500 tons of coal in Naha and in the Bonin Islands, where he purchased large plots of land for harbor and coaling facilities.Footnote ⁷⁴ Without an effective state affiliation, the recently settled Bonin Islands with the large harbor of Port Lloyd were in a particularly advantageous location, just a few day’s sail off Edo Bay. The commodore named three white settlers representatives of the US Navy and stipulated a “constitution” for this colony of “wanderers from many lands, civilized and savage,”Footnote ⁷⁵ as he phrased it. The thirteen paragraphs of his constitution cemented the authority of the councilmen and entitled them to prosecute, punish, and return ship-jumpers to their ships – closing an escape route for abused sailors and coolies.

Despite controversies in view of the unequivocal evidence regarding the abusive nature of the coolie trade, the hypocritical but dominant opinion among American diplomats remained that it is unnecessary to suppress the trade since “there are many Chinese who are willing to go under the terms offered.”Footnote ⁷⁶ To expand this highly problematic business, Perry envisioned the Bonin Islands as a supply station for passers-by, and as a base to police the region for deserters and mutineers:

Rather than following in the wake of stranded American whalers, whom he professed to protect, Perry pursued a geostrategic agenda in providing naval infrastructure for the expansion of American commerce.

Confidently, he later proclaimed that these arrangements would reduce the shipping time from Shanghai to New York to fifty-two days, bringing the two metropoles closer than London and Hong Kong.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Jason Smith points out, America’s presence at sea until the mid nineteenth century consisted chiefly of whaling and trading fleets, and those naval missions that followed and were generally subservient to the nation’s commercial interests. It was only after the Civil War, which had decimated the commercial fleet, that a “Mahanian impetus” gained momentum, in which the navy emphasized the proactive expansion of naval infrastructure and the occupation of strategical sites ahead of commercial fleets.Footnote ⁷⁹ In some way, Perry anticipated the role the navy would play in the fin-de-siècle imperialism.

Espionage and Reverse Engineering

In Uraga, Perry’s negotiators presented the shogunal authorities with a letter from his president to the “Emperor of Japan,” and a few samples of American industry and craftsmanship. Among them was a telegraph and a model train with a fully functional steam engine.Footnote ⁸⁰ Without ever disembarking, Perry then withdrew from Edo Bay with the announcement to return in the next year with the intention of negotiating a treaty. Almost immediately, the senior council entrusted Egawa Tarōzaemon with the construction of defense positions or daiba in Edo Bay, a project of highest priority to be tackled right away.Footnote ⁸¹ The construction of eleven artificial islands right off the city was realized in a dash starting in the fall of 1853. Within one year, five of the islands were completed and two more were left incomplete when the construction was halted once the fear of an imminent invasion had subsided with the convention of Kanagawa upon Perry’s return in 1854.Footnote ⁸² Despite the quick completion of harbor fortifications, without a sizable fleet of strong-hulled battle ships, Japan remained vulnerable to naval incursion, as Egawa had argued with his ominous scenario of Edo’s “strangulation”.

In the tenth month of 1853, Egawa asked Abe for permission to hire the castaway Manjirō to build a steam boat. Manjirō had moved to Edo a few months prior, where he had given interviews about the conditions in the West to Abe, Egawa, and other shogunal elite officials.Footnote ⁸³ The request was granted with the remark that Manjirō was to be kept under strict surveillance lest he would attempt leaving the country or interacting with strangers.Footnote ⁸⁴ Like earlier naval experiments undertaken in the 1840s, this project, too, was top secret. Building a steamboat from scratch was a daunting task, but Manjirō’s ability to read and translate English works on navigation helped lay out the primary exigencies.Footnote ⁸⁵ Most essential was the construction of hulls solid enough to carry canons or even an engine. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Japanese shipwrights had adapted to wood scarcity and the pressure of commercialized shipping markets by designing cheap vessels easy to handle, but inapt for pelagic sailing, not to mention naval warfare. Square-rigged, these vessels could navigate at most forty-five degrees off the wind, a major handicap compared to fore-and-aft rigged schooners or sloops. Unlike Western vessels, which required massive beams from large trees for the keel and mast, Japanese junks were assembled from small pieces and virtually without any use of metal nails – even the masts were kept together with ropes. Foreign observers often described Japanese ships and sailors with contempt, but as we have seen, these design choices were adaptations to wood shortages and economic pressure.Footnote ⁸⁶

Just months after the black ships’ second visit in March 1854, the Russian admiral Yevfimiy Putyatin reached Shimoda. Like Perry, Putyatin had visited the Bonin Islands in August 1853 before he started treaty negotiations at Nagasaki, almost at the same time as Perry was negotiating at Uraga. Besides the conclusion of a trading treaty, Putyatin’s mission was also meant to define the Russo-Japanese borderline in the north.Footnote ⁸⁷ Due to the outbreak of the Crimean War, however, Putyatin had to interrupt his negotiations and instead sailed to Shimoda again in the following year.Footnote ⁸⁸ While his fleet was at anchor, the great Ansei Tōkai earthquake struck on December 23. A tsunami of seven meters sank almost every ship in the bay and destroyed most of the harbor town. Only Putyatin’s flagship Diana, though severely damaged, could be recovered and was moved to a wharf on the western coast of the Izu peninsula on January 15. On its way, however, the battered vessel ran aground off Suruga province and was damaged beyond repair.Footnote ⁸⁹ Kawaji Saemonnojō, the shogunal chief negotiator in Shimoda, rushed to recover the wreck, tow it to the hidden bay of Heda, and, with the help of the Russian castaways, rebuild the vessel. Putyatin first rejected the offer and suggested instead to just build a small boat to go solicit help from Russia. But Kawaji had already called Manjirō and a group of master carpenters to the site. The shogunate quickly allocated the awesome sum of 2,300 golden ryō to build a schooner of 100 tons.Footnote ⁹⁰ From the Diana’s wreck, the carpenters had recovered a Russian manual which, with the castaways’ technical advice, provided the blueprint for this first Japanese-built schooner.

The two-masted Heda-gō was commissioned in the third month of 1855, after just over 100 days of work. At 24.6 meters, the schooner was admittedly much smaller than the large, armed frigate Diana, which had carried 500 sailors to Japan. Yet features such as the versatile fore-and-aft rigging, or vertical ribs resting on the keel to support the ship’s hull against waves and collisions, were significant innovations for the Japanese shipwrights (Figure 5.4). Admiral Putyatin and forty-seven of his crew set sail in the fifth month of 1855, while the remaining 450 or-so sailors chartered an American trading vessel to return home. The makeshift schooner Heda-gō was later returned – towed back – to Japan with the diplomatic gift of fifty-two canons on board.Footnote ⁹¹ In the meantime, the carpenters at Heda had already built six more vessels of the same design, to be called the Kimizawa series. In the eleventh month of the same year, the vessels were commissioned to support the harbor fortifications of Edo.Footnote ⁹² The sheer pace at which Japanese engineers reversely engineered an oceangoing vessel based on formerly unknown plans reveals ambition and ability in the shogunate’s strategic pivot toward the offshore.

Figure 5.4 Construction plan for the Heda-gō’s “fore-and-aft” rigging, 1855. In: Heda Wharf Museum, Numazu City.

While the shogunate was now building a substantial navy, defense duties remained in the hands of different domains. Upon suggestion by shogunal adviser Katsu Rintarō “Kaishū,” the shogunate invited Dutch instructors to teach navigation, mathematics, and astronomy at the newly-founded Shogunal Naval Academy kaigun denjūsho. The academy started in 1855, with a program that was centered on the handling of Dutch-built steamboats. It was in this context that the steamboat Kanrin-maru was ordered from the Netherlands in late 1854. Delivered in the spring of 1857, the corvette was the first steamboat to sail under the shogunal flag. It is somewhat ironic that the naval academy was so much centered on steam navigation while most naval activity remained propelled by wind. Sakamoto Takuya points out that, until the downfall of the Tokugawa in 1868, just about one-third of the eighty-six steamboats active in Japanese services went on account of the shogunal navy.Footnote ⁹³

The race for naval technology remained a competition among the autonomous entities of fragmented Japan. Chōshū, a domain rich in coal deposits, harbored particular ambitions in the creation of a domain navy and purchased a force of eight steamboats. Chōshū traded coal with Satsuma, especially after the bombardment of Shimonoseki in 1863, which opened an irreparable abyss between the shogunate and the two powerful western domains. The shogunate, however, remained in control of Japan’s only wharf capable of carrying out major engine repairs, the Seitetsu-jo in Nagasaki.Footnote ⁹⁴ Though the founding of a machine factory and a wharf were expedited in the vicinity of Edo, the shogunate’s first and only self-made steamboat, the sixty-horsepower gunboat Chiyoda-gata, was not commissioned until March 1867, just months before the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate.Footnote ⁹⁵

Space and Place of Japan’s “Opening”

On January 18, 1862, the shogunal steamboat Kanrin-maru, weighed down by cannons, entered the harbor of Port Lloyd in the Bonin Islands, smoking, steaming, and firing salvos. The shogunate celebrated Japan’s colonial debut in the island Pacific with a series of visual narratives that underpinned the dramaturgy of Tokugawa gunboat diplomacy by juxtaposing its steam-powered supremacy to a group of islanders approaching on an outrigger canoe (Figure 5.5).Footnote ⁹⁶ Staffed with the best graduates from the Shogunal Naval Academy and first flying the rising sun as a national symbol, the expedition had been wandering a stormy sea for almost two weeks before it finally located the islands in the vast ocean – a breakneck expedition that could have ended far less glamorously.Footnote ⁹⁷ After decades of naval reforms, technological research, and navigational training, the shogunate eventually asserted its capabilities by reclaiming the whaling entrepôt in the Bonin Islands. A visual response to the shock Matthew C. Perry’s black ships had sent across the Japanese public less than a decade earlier, the shogunal venture to the Bonin Islands could hardly have been more fraught with symbolism of modernity and national power.

Figure 5.5 The Japanese steamboat Kanrin-maru firing salvos in the Bonin Islands on January 18, 1862. In: Ogasawara-tō shinkeizu vol. 3, p. 25, in: NDL, Acc. No.: W243.

This chapter has shown that the so-called “opening” of Japan was a decades-long process that crept in from the archipelago’s peripheries, the frontier in a maritime competition over resources and jurisdiction. The places at the forefront of this imperial power negotiation – the harbor of Naha, where foreign vessels called even after the issue of the Shell-Repel edict (in vigor 1825–1842), the remote beaches of Iheya and Ishigaki, or the coasts of rural Ezo – were in fact made ports of call before the age of treaties. The whalers who had settled in the Bonin Islands, again, catered to an industrialization offshore. Though the whalers who populated the ocean since the 1820s could be kept off the Japanese core lands with the issue of the Shell-Repel edict, the conflict-laden coolie transports that picked up along the Kuroshio in the late 1840s, and the steam-powered navies that followed in their wake, brought international conflicts ashore. In the geopolitical vision of naval strategists, maritime Northeast Asia was crisscrossed by an infrastructure web from the coal deposits in Naha and the Bonin Islands to Japanese harbor towns and the coal mines in their hinterland. With the opening of treaty ports of Shimoda, Kanagawa, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Hyōgo, foreign interest focused on Japanese harbors with their ready supply of high-quality Japanese coal, while the dwindling whaling industry retreated to the arctic bays of the Bering Strait. Hakodate, again, turned into a bustling whaling entrepôt within months of the town’s opening in 1854, while the whalers gradually retreated from the Japan Ground’s southern reaches.Footnote ⁹⁸ It is along these shifting geographies of industry and infrastructure that Tokugawa Japan sought its place in the power structures of a converging Pacific world.

This decades-long process instigated a technological competition between the shogunate and several powerful domains. The watering of a steamboat prototype by Satsuma in 1855 and the construction of a fully functional model steam locomotive in Saga the same year underline that Japanese steam and naval technology had been in decentralized and classified development since the 1840s, while the shogunate tried to integrate domain resources into its defense dispositions. Repeated approaches of foreign vessels to Edo Bay since 1837 and China’s naval defeat in the Opium War against Britain in 1842 had made it clear that maritime defense could no longer center on individual harbors, since Western navies threatened to sever Japan’s vital maritime cargo highways. The revocation of the Shell-Repel edict the same year ushered in two conflicted decades of reform and integration. Regardless, the Robert Bowne incident of 1852 ultimately evidenced that commercial traffic on the “high seas” had yielded to a naval realpolitik that turned the sea itself into a jurisdiction subject to the law of the stronger.

When Commodore Perry’s black ships eventually cruised to Japan in 1853, the commodore was anxious to be surpassed by French or Russian expeditions to Japan. Slowed down by the British with their exclusive control of coaling stations along the way to Asia, Perry installed his own agents in Shanghai with the order to prevent other missions to Japan from purchasing coal.Footnote ⁹⁹ The steam-powered routes that were to cross the Pacific in the commodore’s vision were meant to reduce travel time from New York to Shanghai to fifty-two days – the same duration mail employed from Liverpool.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ With the Atlantic slave trade under pressure, the commodore also sought to facilitate the trafficking of indentured “coolie” laborers shanghaied in Asian harbors and ferried across the Pacific along the Kuroshio route.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the Bonin Islands, he instated three white settlers as representatives of his government over the heterogenous community of farmers and marooned crew, with explicit orders to prosecute ship-jumpers. The military guidance for the expansion of American commerce Perry practiced was, in some way, an anticipation of even cruder fin-de-siècle imperialism. It was this infrastructure-oriented imperialism the shogunate aspired to imitate when they informed all foreign representations in late 1861 that the shogunal navy would soon reclaim what they contended was an abandoned colony of theirs in the Bonin Islands.