The Japanese aesthetic even extended beyond the purely visual, influencing poets like Ezra Pound, and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.Īn unnamed American tourist posing awkwardly in samurai armor, circa 1890. Some of them, such Henry Humphrey Moore, Winckworth Gay, and William Heine moved to Japan to live and work for a few years. Everyone from Monet to Van Gogh was captivated by Japan, and American painters were no exception. Japonisme, caused by the arrival of these goods in the West , blew a giant hole in the European art world, and Impressionism burst out of it. Japanese handcrafts and art, especially ceramics, silk and woodblock prints, were the primary exports that funded the modernization efforts of the Meiji Emperor. In addition to the experts and the missionaries, American artists flocked to the country starting in the 1870’s. This is how the majority of Americans became acquainted with Japanese culture in the 19th century, through the missionaries. Likewise, missionaries who returned from Japan were frequent speakers in churches, lecture halls and on the Chautauqua circuit. Missionary publications, like the Baptist Missionary Magazine, regularly printed stories about everyday life in Japan, along with accounts of the missionary efforts. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were nearly one thousand American missionaries in Nippon, and more than 30,000 converts. And Japan was thought to be a prime candidate for both. The Third Great Awakening was underway, a surge of evangelical fervor wedded to a powerful social message: improve the world, save the world. More often than not, it was missionary zeal. In the 19th century, it wasn’t just trade and good-paying gigs as experts that drove the Americans out into the world.
They also attempted to introduce what most of them would have considered America’s greatest export, Protestant Christianity. The fuji apple is a cross between two American cultivars brought to Japan by American agronomists: the Red Delicious and the Ralls Genet.įor their part, the American experts introduced the Japanese to everything from brass band music to baseball to apple pie. Certainly, it helped that the Japanese paid their experts exceedingly well and treated them with enormous respect, but more than that, Japan enchanted visitors like no other place in Asia. Most of them chose to renew their contracts for extra years, more than a few stayed forever, and all recalled their time in Japan with pleasure. One of the most remarkable things about these foreigners, especially the Americans, was how much they loved Japan. It would be an understatement to say that they were successful. Determined to catch up with the West, the young emperor and his advisors centralized power, abolished the samurai class, and invited in hundreds of western experts–French, German, British and American–to help in the remaking of Japan. The change started in earnest when the feudalism of the Tokogawa Shogunate was replaced in 1868 by the forward-looking rule of the 16-year-old Meiji Emperor. Majestically impassive in public, his personality and thoughts remain an open question for historians. And eighteen days from Japan to San Francisco was better than the one-hundred-and-twenty days from New York to San Francisco.
I am desirous that our two countries should trade with each other for the benefit both of Japan and the United States.Ĭalifornia was the only state mentioned in the letter (Oregon still being a territory) because California miners were still strapped for food and supplies. Japan is also a rich and fertile country, and produces many very valuable articles.
Our great state of California produces about sixty million dollars in gold, every year, besides silver, quicksilver, precious stones and many other valuable articles. Our steamships can go from California to Japan in eighteen days. The United States of American reach from ocean to ocean, and our territory of Oregon and state of California lie directly opposite to the dominions of your Imperial Majesty. However, what becomes very clear when you read the official letter President Millard Fillmore had Perry deliver is that the gold of California was at the forefront of American minds. Perry’s mission was to open Japanese ports to American trade, and to establish coaling stations - refueling points - for steamships along the route from China to California. In 1853, just five years after John Marshall’s discovery of gold, Commodore Matthew Perry and a flotilla of American warships sailed into Edo Bay and ended 250 years of self-imposed Japanese isolation.
Imperious, dyspeptic, gouty but also fair and very capable, Commodore Perry was not a man to take no for an answer.
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