Perry at Uraga: How Did the Shogunate Respond to the Black Ships?

The National Archives of Japan’s explanation identifies Nakajima Saburosuke and other yoriki of the Uraga magistrate’s office among those who responded to the fleet. Yoriki were officials who carried out administrative duties under a magistrate. They told the American side that negotiations should take place at Nagasaki.

Nagasaki provided an established channel through which foreign relations had been handled. The Uraga officials attempted to direct the arriving fleet into those arrangements. Deciding where to send the visitors also concerned who would deal with them: the place of negotiation belonged to a system of responsibility.

Perry rejected this direction. He demanded that the American presidential letter be received in Edo Bay. The channel proposed by the shogunate and the location demanded by the fleet did not fit together. From the first response, the place where negotiations would occur was itself an issue.

The people who dealt with the fleet at Uraga cannot be described only as stunned and unable to act. Officials presented an established procedure; the visitors refused it. Their exchange brought a practical question to the shore: could this arrival be handled through the existing channel for foreign relations?

The records of people who performed the work at Uraga bring that question closer to the encounter. Uraga Yoriki yori no Kikigaki records accounts from five yoriki, including Kayama Eizaemon. The National Archives introduces the work as a copy made a little over a month after Perry’s departure from Japan.

Its explanation includes criticism by one of the officers. According to that account, senior officials who had information about the American mission kept it secret and failed to take measures; notification to the Uraga magistrate had not reached the yoriki. Someone involved in receiving the visitors questioned how information had been handled.

What survives here is criticism expressed from a particular officer’s position. The record does not speak for the thoughts of every official in the shogunate. It nevertheless offers a way to consider the distance between information being available at the top and being passed to the people who would respond.

What information had reached the men who approached the fleet and established its demands? Reading their recorded accounts reveals a problem less visible when we look only at the size of the Black Ships. The response on the coast was also connected to the movement of information leading there.

On 14 July 1853, six days after the arrival, the letter was handed over at Kurihama. In the Japanese calendar then in use, this was the ninth day of the sixth month of Kaei 6. The shogunate agreed to receive the document and prepared a reception hall on this coast.

The fleet’s arrival off Uraga and the landing at Kurihama were distinct places and occasions. Responding to ships offshore was followed by preparing somewhere on land for the document to change hands. The National Archives identifies the Uraga magistrates Toda Ujiyoshi and Ido Hiromichi as the Japanese officials who received it.

Receipt of the letter was not equivalent to accepting everything it requested. It meant taking the demands in written form and assuming the problem of making a response. There was still time between that stage and reaching agreement on particular conditions; receiving a document and agreeing to terms were separate steps.

The reception hall at Kurihama cannot be understood simply as a place where one landing settled everything. In a space prepared on the coast, the document was received and an entry into negotiations continuing into the following year was made. That sequence gives the handover its place in the longer account.

The fleet’s movements continued after the letter was delivered. According to the explanation of Edowan Okatame Ezu, the American ships entered farther into the bay and conducted surveys. Completing the exchange of documents and bringing the ships’ activity to an end were not one and the same task.

The Japanese side strongly protested this activity. The fleet returned toward Sarushima but reportedly continued surveying the bay. Outside the place of negotiation, officials still had to respond to what was happening on the water. A reception on land did not contain every part of the encounter.

Investigating the bay and its routes also bore on a fleet’s future return. While documents were received on the shore, the actions of warships at sea remained under scrutiny. Following both settings helps us see why responding to the arrival could not be completed within the reception hall alone.

The American reply recorded on the map is presented in paraphrase in the National Archives’ explanation. We do not turn it into invented verbatim dialogue. Instead, we follow the documented sequence of surveying, protest and surveying that continued. The pressure accompanying the paperwork also becomes visible in those actions.

Perry returned in 1854, and negotiations with the shogunate continued. On 31 March, the Treaty of Peace and Amity, also known as the Convention of Kanagawa, was concluded at the reception hall in Yokohama. From receiving a letter at Kurihama the previous year, the parties moved to setting terms in a treaty.

The treaty opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate and provided for supplying American ships with necessities such as fuel, water and food, as well as protecting shipwrecked people. Opening ports involved deciding where vessels would be received and what would be provided; these were concrete arrangements concerning ships and their crews.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ explanation also identifies permission for a consul at Shimoda and unilateral most-favored-nation treatment. This meant that advantageous terms Japan granted another country would also extend to the United States; the provision ran in favor of the American side. The agreement contained conditions beyond the ports themselves.

Keeping the year of the letter’s receipt separate from the year of the treaty’s signature makes the passage from receiving demands to putting agreed conditions into writing more visible. The memory of the Black Ships’ arrival can then be read alongside the particular content of the negotiations that followed it.

Returning to the shore, we can now see other movements around the four ships that first came into view. Yoriki responded at Uraga and proposed Nagasaki as the channel for negotiation. At Kurihama, a hall was prepared to receive the letter, while warriors from several domains provided security.

The existence of advance warning does not establish that information had been shared adequately or that preparations were sufficient. The collected testimony and later illustrated account preserve criticism from people connected to the work on the ground. A problem lay between acquiring information and connecting it to the response.

Receiving a document, protesting activity at sea and determining treaty conditions the following year offer concrete ways to answer how the shogunate acted. Following roles and surviving records brings the response into clearer view than assigning a single state of mind to everyone involved in it.

The coast that received the Black Ships carries more than the impression of large vessels. It also holds the work of handling demands, passing information and moving toward written terms. Along the route from Uraga through Kurihama to Yokohama, the remembered arrival opens into a history of negotiation.