United States Had to Penetrate

¶ … United States had to penetrate the Japanese Empire as a way of countering the European dominance of trade in the Western Pacific. To do this, Perry attempted to intimidate the Japanese and superior Western technology.

To do this, Perry attempted to intimidate the Japanese and superior Western technology. Although he did not accomplish this during the Fillmore administration, he accomplished it on his return trip to Japan in 1854 when he returned with even more ships and repeated his intimidating actions, flaunting superior American firepower in their ships and convincing the Japanese leadership that they could not hopefully win in a competition with the United States and repel a naval attack.

Very simply, the Tokugawa government in Edo succumbed to American pressure without any resistance and abandoned its two-centuries'-old seclusion policy because they were cowed by the American naval presence. Previous attempts to secure trade concessions without such force had failed. The significant consequences of Tokugawa's signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa with the United States were to open up Japan to trade with the West.

President Fillmore wrote the letter to the emperor in an attempt to secure the trade agreement. In this way, they could support part of the Japanese side. The shogun was the defacto ruler of Japan. The letter was an example by President Fillmore of a classic strategy of divide and conquers. Millard Fillmore was a member of the Whig Party. He sent the Perry Mission when he did to beat a Russian mission to Japan.

The opening of Japan to the West by Commodore Matthew C. Perry profoundly affected the American imagination at the time and laid the basis for the later U.S. penetration of the Pacific, including the acquisition of the Hawaii and the Philippines many years later at the end of the nineteenth century. While Fillmore did so cautiously, Americans would do later with much more gusto against other entities in the Pacific in competition with the other Western powers and in competition with the later emerging Japanese power in the Pacific.

As shown later, the Japanese were able to successfully adapt use and excel successfully in using the Western technology against the other powers to repel advances and to build their own empire. Perry's mission successfully ended Japanese isolation but also indirectly brought on the very circumstances that led to the U.S.-Japanese competition in the Pacific and directly later on to World War II in the later twentieth century. In a nutshell, the Perry mission's negations were successful and the Treaty of Kanagwa was signed in Shimoda, Japan. This treaty permitted American ships to buy coal in Japan and memorialized the requested protection for shipwrecked American seaman, in particular whalers who steamed off of Japanese waters in their annual hunts at sea.