As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States

"This is an account of the first-ever official delegation from Japan to the United States, in 1860, to ratify a treaty between the two countries. In some ways, it’s a micro history that really zooms into the tiny details of this trip. It’s wonderful. It’s one of the few history books that have made me laugh out loud. It is very entertaining. There’s this really dry humour throughout that comes through in the way the sources are excerpted and translated. Miyoshi’s background is in Victorian literature , he’s not somebody trained as a historian of Japan, so he approaches historical sources in a way that is wonderfully refreshing. One of the things that this book really shows you is that you can write something that’s really entertaining and accessible without necessarily adopting this mode of putting all your sources under the hood. Miyoshi brings you quite close to the sources that he’s using, he ponders over them with you. He makes some pretty speculative interpretive moves that, of course, you can disagree with, but they’re just fantastically imaginative. “I like to ask my students why they became interested in Japan and Japanese history” It’s a very interesting read and gives some real insight into relations between Japan and the US in the past. Miyoshi occupies a position that critically scrutinizes the different assumptions on both sides—certain racist ideas on the part of the Americans, but also certain obsessions on the part of the Japanese delegates as well. He does this by comparing how different this embassy looks when you focus on Japanese language sources—travelogues, diaries, and official reports—as opposed to the Western language sources that are coming out of the American government, but also the American press, which really treats this visit as a sensational event. On the other hand, most of the lower-ranking participants in the embassy from Japan were confined to their rooms. Their journals contain a lot of sketches of hotel sinks and hotel dressers! Miyoshi is able to weave this all together in a fascinating way. The Harris Treaty opened several Japanese ports to trade. It also included the provision that Americans in Japan would be exempt from the jurisdiction of Japanese law, giving them the same kind of extraterritorial rights that the British demanded after winning the Opium War with China . That gave it the reputation of being an unequal treaty in Japan and a diplomatic coup for the United States over the British. In Miyoshi’s account, this backdrop is relevant to the carefully staged diplomatic performances on display."