Mr. Harris urged that it was better to yield a little willingly than perhaps to give much hereafter, and bringing his own personal influence to bear in various quarters, successfully carried his point, and within a very few days found himself back at Simoda, and the Powhattam steaming away with the first commercial treaty framed and signed in Japan since the year 1613. Thus our successes at Tientsin opened not only China but Japan likewise. The history of the previous negotiations with Japan are curious.
Directly the Allied Expeditions of 1857 were known to be in Chinese waters, the Dutch and Americans took good care that its achievements, its force, and objects should be thoroughly appreciated by the Japanese authorities; and they accompanied their information with disinterested suggestions as to certain treaties which would avert similar proceedings from the land of the Day Dawn. Agitated, bothered, seeing no end to these treaties (for ever since Commodore Perry’s visit they had been incessantly pestered with conventions and treaties), the Taikoon listened patiently, but evidently doubted at first who was his real friend. The war rolled to Northern China; it was getting unpleasantly close, and seemed even more like war than what the Japanese had witnessed during the “hide-and-go-seek operations” against Russia. The Taikoon and council at Yedo sent for Mr. D. Curtis from Nangasaki, and the American Consul from Simoda. They were kept apart, negotiated with singly, watched, reported upon, and played off one against the other to a charming extent, yet with much kindness and courtesy; and they were treated with very great distinction so far as the etiquette of the court was concerned. Mr. Harris was especially honoured; he dwelt for six months in a house within the limits of the imperial enclosure, and in the heart of Yedo. He lived at the imperial charge; and when some excitement arose from the mob being worked upon by a reactionary party, a strong guard was sent to patrol round his quarters, and made responsible for his safety. The Prince of Bitsu then held in the imperial council a position somewhat akin to that of our Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Mr. Harris had frequent interviews with him, and found him an intelligent, well-informed nobleman. He was evidently fully aware that the time had arrived in which Japan should, and indeed must, enter into relations with foreign nations. But he had two great difficulties to contend with. On the one hand, the prejudices of a powerful party in both council and state, who were opposed to any alteration of policy, and encouraged in their fears of the foreigner by the priesthood, who preserved a knowledge of the narrow escape they had had from total annihilation at the hands of Xavier and his well-disciplined followers. The other anxiety of this enlightened prince and the progressionist party was, how to bring about the change without giving rise to tumult and rebellion within their borders from squabbles and differences with foreigners along the sea-board, which, fanned by one functionary and another, would lead Japan into the same sad state embroglio as China had been so cursed with ever since she had swerved from the great Confucian maxim: “Happy those who never depart from the wisdom of their ancestors.”
During all the winter of 1857-58, these negotiations and conferences went on; and whether it was the obstructionists were two powerful, or that the first alarm occasioned by the huge fleet of allied ships upon the coast of China had passed off, it is impossible to say. At any rate, after acknowledging the justice of the grounds upon which Mr. Harris urged his treaty upon the Taikoon, after promising to concede it, and on more than one occasion actually naming the day it should be formally signed, the Taikoon and Council suddenly broke off negotiations, and in the spring of 1858 intimated that the representatives of Holland and America might return to their respective posts. Mr. Harris, however, had succeeded in thoroughly ingratiating himself in the good graces of the Taikoon and Court. His departure was marked by every act of sympathy and respect; and when on his return to Simoda the worthy American was struck down by sickness, occasioned partly by disappointment and anxiety, the Taikoon generously sent two Japanese medical men of his staff to attend upon him, and despotically desired them to cure Mr. Harris, or perform upon themselves the operation of disembowelment—an alternative usually attending all failures in Japan. Mr. Harris was soon restored to health, and wondering how the subject of the American treaty would be re-opened, when, as I have told, the Powhattan arrived, the news that the Emperor Kienfung had yielded came in the very nick of time, and the Taikoon followed suit.
All this was cheering intelligence for Lord Elgin; it was evident that the official intellect of Japan was just then in that happy condition to which all eastern ones have to be brought before western arguments have much weight: a funk, as the Eton boys say, had been established by our friends the Dutch and Americans in exaggerating the objects of the Allies, and it only remained for us to keep it up until we obtained the same privileges for Great Britain as they had secured for themselves. Mr. Harris, in the most generous manner, gave every assistance and information, and placed at our ambassador’s disposal his secretary, Mr. Hewskin, whose knowledge of the Japanese language rendered him invaluable. We need not dwell upon the circumstances under which the escorting squadron and my stout old frigate eventually reached within gunshot of Yedo—the first foreign keels that ever reached within eyesight of the three million Japanese inhabiting that vast city—that I have already told in another work.
Lord Elgin sent on shore by the first interpreter that visited the Furious to announce his arrival, coupling his object in obtaining a treaty with the presentation of a yacht as an acknowledgment of past courtesies. Commissioners shortly afterwards waited on the ambassador, and made no serious objection to his taking up his residence on shore in the city in Yedo, though it required some skilful fence to induce them to submit quietly to the presence of the British