Convention of Kanagawa

Signed on 31 March 1854 in what is now Yokohama, the Convention of Kanagawa was the agreement by which Japan's Tokugawa shogunate yielded to American naval pressure and opened two ports to United States ships. Extracted by Commodore Matthew C. Perry under the implied threat of force, it brought to an end more than two centuries in which Japan had sharply limited its contact with the outside world, and it set off a chain of further treaties and internal upheaval that led to the fall of the shogunate.

From the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa rulers kept foreign influence at arm's length. Trade was allowed only with Dutch and Chinese merchants, and only at Nagasaki under tight state control. The policy aimed to stop the spread of Christianity and to prevent any regional lord from growing rich enough on foreign trade to challenge the ruling house. By the 1840s it was under strain: in 1844 the Dutch king urged Japan to open up before it was forced to, and in 1846 an American squadron under James Biddle asked for ports and was turned away.

In 1853 President Millard Fillmore sent Perry to Japan with warships, as part of the Perry Expedition. The United States wanted markets, coaling and supply stops for its ships as trade with China grew, and protection for shipwrecked sailors, including the crews of American whalers. Perry arrived with four warships on 8 July 1853 at Uraga, where Edo Bay opens to the sea. He refused to go to Nagasaki and threatened to sail on to Edo itself. He was allowed to land at Kurihama on 14 July to hand over the president's letter.

The demands threw the shogunate into crisis. The shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi died days after Perry left, and the senior councillor Abe Masahiro, believing armed resistance hopeless, took the unprecedented step of polling the regional lords. Of 61 known replies, 19 favoured accepting and 19 opposed, and the rest were vague or conditional. The consultation made the regime look weak and undecided.

Perry returned on 11 February 1854 with eight warships and made it clear he would not leave without an agreement. Talks began on 8 March and lasted about a month. Japan conceded almost everything except a full commercial treaty, which Perry agreed to postpone. The twelve articles made Shimoda and Hakodate available to American ships, guaranteed help and decent treatment for shipwrecked sailors, allowed an American consul at Shimoda, and gave the United States any advantage Japan might later grant another power. Drawn up in English, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese versions, the treaty was ratified on 21 February 1855.

Britain and Russia obtained similar agreements within a year, and France in 1858, and the 1858 Harris Treaty with the United States went much further, granting foreigners extraterritorial rights and low import duties. Japanese resentment of these unequal treaties, and of the shogunate's apparent surrender to foreigners, fed the movement to "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians" and shifted political weight towards the imperial court in Kyoto. Emperor Kōmei's hostility to the treaties strengthened those who wanted to overthrow the shogun, a process that ended in the Meiji Restoration and Japan's rapid modernisation.

Our 1815 map shows the Tokugawa shogunate before the opening, and the 1878 map the reorganised Empire of Japan after the Meiji Restoration.