22. DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES.— Since the close of the 19th century, Japan, which was intro duced to intercourse with the world by the tact ful American expedition of 1853-54, and with which the United States has had recently more points of contact than with any other power except Great Britain, has occupied second place in American diplomatic relations. The earlier importance of friendly relations with Japan, which was first visited by an American vessel (the Elim of New York) at the port of Nagasaki in 1797 and again in 1803 in unsuc cessful attempts to open trade, was greatly in creased by the American discovery of valuable whale fisheries near the Kurile Islands, fol lowed by the imprisonment of ship-wrecked American seamen on the Japanese coasts from which foreigners were excluded by a hermit policy. The importance of closer relations was especially emphasized more strongly by the negotiation of a treaty with China in 1844 and the acquisition of California in 1848, resulting in plans (by 1851) for a trans-Pacific line of steamers. The earliest plans to open trade by an expedition under government auspices, first proposed by Captain Porter in 1815, were never executed. In 1832 President Jackson, recog nizing the need of ports in the Far East, sent Edmund Roberts as a confidential agent to several countries of that region, including Japan, with instructions to negotiate treaties to secure the safety of seamen and commerce, but Roberts did not proceed beyond Cochin China. Later hopes of an opportunity to find a way for the beginning of friendly relations were disappointed by the failure of friendly private attempts to return some shipwrecked Japanese in 1837, and again in 1845, and by the later unsuccessful efforts at peaceful negotia tions to open trade relations through Commo dore Biddle of the American Navy Department in 1846.
In the growing trade with China after 1844, the superiority attained by American ((clipper" ships by 1845, the development of American in terests on the Pacific Coast after 1848, and the increasing importance of accessible harbors for supplies and refuge for American trading and whaling vessels, the American govern ment found new subjects for diplomatic efforts in the Pacific and good reasons for urging the opening of intercourse with Japan. Its purpose
after 1848 to guard more vigilantly American interest in the Pacific was indicated by negotia tion of the first treaty with Hawaii in 1849 and also a treaty with the Sultan of Bruni in Borneo in 1850; and its determination incidently to resist more strenuously the Japanese policy of strict Oriental isolation and exclusiveness which provoked American enterprise (else where so successful in mastering opposition) was illustrated in 1849 by the peremptory de mand of Commander Glynn for the immediate release of 16 American prisoners — a demand to Which the Japanese officials acceded after failure to evade it by successive strategic manoeuvres, first by threats of offensive opera tions, then by haughty indifference and finally by evasive diplomacy. In 1851, the American government, influenced by Glynn's enthusiastic suggestions and proposals for conversion of the Japanese policy, decided upon another friendly appeal for access and supplies for trading ves sels, through instructions to Commodore Aulick whose powers were transferred (in November 1852) to Commodore M. C. Perry.
Without use of force, but by exhibition of American power through ships and inventions, Perry in March 1854 negotiated the first treaty of Japan with a western power — a treaty which, regarded as a marked American success, pro vided for peace, amity, trade and supplies at the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, protection to shipwrecked sailors and ships in distress, consular residence at Shimoda. and most favored-nation treatment. From the expedi tion and the treaty Japan dates its new birth — a fact recently recognized by the erection of r.• monument to Perry in 1901. For over half a century, with only a brief exception, relations continued mutually friendly.