Maiden Voyage: The Senzaimaru and the Creation of Modern Sino-Japanese Relations

By Joshua A. Fogel

After centuries of virtual isolation, during which time international sea travel was forbidden outside of Japan’s immediate fishing shores, Japanese shogunal authorities in 1862 made the unprecedented decision to launch an official delegation to China by sea. Concerned by the fast-changing global environment, they had witnessed the ever-increasing number of incursions into Asia by European powers—not the least of which was Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853–54 and the forced opening of a handful of Japanese ports at the end of the decade. The Japanese reasoned that it was only a matter of time before they too encountered the same unfortunate fate as China; their hope was to learn from the Chinese experience and to keep foreign powers at bay. They dispatched the Senzaimaru to Shanghai with the purpose of investigating contemporary conditions of trade and diplomacy in the international city. Japanese from varied domains, as well as shogunal officials, Nagasaki merchants, and an assortment of deck hands, made the voyage along with a British crew, spending a total of ten weeks observing and interacting with the Chinese and with a handful of Westerners. Roughly a dozen Japanese narratives of the voyage were produced at the time, recounting personal impressions and experiences in Shanghai. The Japanese emissaries had the distinct advantage of being able to communicate with their Chinese hosts by means of the "brush conversation" (written exchanges in literary Chinese). For their part, the Chinese authorities also created a paper trail of reports and memorials concerning the Japanese visitors, which worked its way up and down the bureaucratic chain of command.

This was the first official meeting of Chinese and Japanese in several centuries. Although the Chinese authorities agreed to few of the Japanese requests for trade relations and a consulate, nine years later China and Japan would sign the first bilateral treaty of amity in their history, a completely equal treaty. East Asia—and the diplomatic and trade relations between the region’s two major players in the modern era—would never be the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9780520959170

Joshua A. Fogel

Joshua A. Fogel is Canada Research Chair and Professor of History at York University. He is the author of many books, including Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time and Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 CE: Relic, Text, Object, Fake. He is also the editor of The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography and the online journal Sino-Japanese Studies.

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Maiden Voyage

Maiden Voyage

THE SENZAIMARU AND THE CREATION OF MODERN SINO-JAPANESE RELATIONS

Joshua A. Fogel

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

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© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fogel, Joshua A., 1950–.

    Maiden voyage : the Senzaimaru and the creation of modern Sino-Japanese relations / Joshua A. Fogel.

       p.    cm.—(Philip E. Lilienthal Asian studies imprint)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28330-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-95917-0 (ebook)

    1. Japan—Foreign economic relations—China.    2. China—Foreign economic relations—Japan.    3. Japan—Foreign relations—1600–1868.    4. China—Foreign relations—1644–1912.    I. Title.    II. Title: Senzai Maru and the creation of modern Sino-Japanese relations.    III. Title: Senzaimaru and the creation of modern Sino-Japanese relations.

    HF1602.15.C6F64    2014

    382’.95105209034—dc232014006512

Manufactured in the United States of America

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To Philip Kuhn and Akira Iriye

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Situating 1862 in History and Shanghai in 1862

1 • The Armistice, Shanghai, and the Facilitator

2 • Japanese Plans and the Scene in Nagasaki

3 • Getting to Nagasaki, Loading Cargo, and the Voyage to Shanghai

4 • Coming to Terms with the City of Shanghai and Its Inhabitants

5 • Westerners in Shanghai: The Chinese Malaise

6 • Opium, Christianity, and the Taipings

7 • Dealings with the Chinese Authorities

8 • Preparing for the Trip Home

9 • Subsequent Missions to China in the Late Edo Period

10 • The Senzaimaru in Fiction and Film

Conclusion: The Senzaimaru in History

Appendix: Japanese and Chinese Texts

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Sketch of Senzaimaru with characters

2. T. Kroes, A. F. Bauduin, and A. J. Bauduin

3. Matsudaya Hankichi’s sketch of the Senzaimaru

4. Takasugi Shinsaku

5. Matsudaya Hankichi’s rendition of the Senzaimaru keeling

6. Hibino Teruhiro’s sketch of the Saddle Islands

7. Takasugi Shinsaku’s sketch of an Armstrong cannon with notes

8. Replica of the pistol purchased by Takasugi Shinsaku in Shanghai

9. Takasugi Shinsaku’s notebook from brush conversation with Chinese scholar

10. Nōtomi Kaijirō’s sketch of a local brave

11. Wu Xu

12. Drawing of Wang Renbo

13. Publicity poster for Noroshi wa Shanhai ni agaru

14. Godai Tomoatsu

15. Bandō Tsumasaburō (as Takasugi Shinsaku) and Mei Xi (as Shen Yizhou)

FIGURE 1. Sketch of Senzaimaru with characters.

Introduction

SITUATING 1862 IN HISTORY AND SHANGHAI IN 1862

THIS BOOK IS FOCUSED PRIMARILY on the year 1862 and the events in that year leading up to the first official meeting of Chinese and Japanese in over three centuries.¹ The year 1862 was much like any other year, only different, as most years are. The previous year is probably more famous now with the first inaugural of President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), followed soon by the commencement of the American Civil War after the South’s attack on Fort Sumter (South Carolina) on April 12, while across the globe Tsar Alexander II (1818–1881) freed the Russian serfs from centuries of servitude in early March. Nonetheless, 1862 was to be the first full year of the War Between the States, featuring the most famous naval battle in US history to that point between two ironclads, the Union’s Monitor (launched January 30) and the Confederacy’s Merrimack (launched March 8), in the Battle of Hampton Roads on March 9.

Later that year, on June 19, the government of the United States (finally) outlawed slavery, though the Civil War would drag on with horrendous loss of life and destruction for another three years. The Battle of Antietam (Maryland) on September 17 resulted in some 23,000 casualties, the bloodiest single day in all US history. Five days later on September 22, Lincoln announced that on January 1 he would issue what has come to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing over three million slaves in the states then in revolt. Many other battles would be fought over the course of the year.

In order to help finance the Civil War, the US government instituted the first income tax in 1861 and the following year the Internal Revenue Service came into existence. President Lincoln introduced paper currency on February 25, 1862, over a millennium after it was first issued in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Undoubtedly also related indirectly to the war, the first telegraphic hookup between New York and San Francisco was established on November 6.

In 1862 many cultural figures of note were born (such as Gustav Klimt, d. 1918, in Austria) and many died (such as Henry David Thoreau, b. 1817). While at least the free states in the United States were celebrating Independence Day on July 4, that very day Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832–1898) extemporized the stories that would become his classic Alice in Wonderland. Late that spring and summer also witnessed what would have been an extraordinary event, had it been true, when Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) made a grand tour of Europe and interviewed Charles Dickens (1812–1870)—it turns out to have been an elaborate hoax.² Dostoevsky had published Notes from the House of the Dead just eighteen months before, and Dickens had published Great Expectations in 1861. The whole tale of this meeting of master novelists ultimately was too good to be true.

Meanwhile in China the Taiping Rebellion had been raging for over a decade by 1862, but the rebels, once poised to topple the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), now lacked most of their original leadership and were losing ground with each passing day. After besieging Shanghai with its large foreign community on several occasions in the first half of 1862, the Qing armed forces, with assistance from the American adventurer Frederick Townsend Ward (1831–1862) and his Ever Victorious Army, handed the Taipings a stunning defeat in the Battle of Cixi at a site some ten miles outside Ningbo. Ward was shot in the fighting on September 21, and he died the next day. As we shall see, the Taiping forces attacked in the outskirts of Shanghai a few days after the central event of this book transpired, and the Japanese visitors to China were unexpectedly close, if not quite direct, witnesses to it. The Taipings, however, soon withdrew from the city on the orders of their leader, Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), to help defend their Heavenly Capital, the occupied city of Nanjing.

The Xianfeng Emperor (r. 1851–1861) had died in August 1861, and he was succeeded by his five-year-old son, the Tongzhi Emperor (r. 1862–1874). Obviously the boy was too young to rule the empire, so it was at this point that his mother, the infamous Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), among others took over the actual running of government (Queen Victoria [1819–1901] was coincidentally widowed in 1861 and would begin her long personal reign thereafter). China’s first modern foreign office, the Zongli Yamen was founded in March of 1861, and it would become an increasingly important institution with the passage of time; it held ultimate responsibility for handling the Japanese who showed up in 1862 in Shanghai unannounced. And, the famed Tongzhi Restoration would begin in earnest in that year of 1862.³

Among the more ignominious distinctions characterizing 1862 was the incidence of the first attempted seizure by pirates of a steamship, the Iron Prince. Pirates were, of course, nothing new, having been part of the coastal presence in China for many centuries, but they had always been limited technologically to hijacking sail ships. The year 1862 thus marks the start of a new style of corsair activity, disabusing any notion that the speed enabled by steam would make ships impervious to such predation.

In Japan the bakumatsu period had already begun in 1862, although no one knew that the Tokugawa regime was slated to exit the stage of history before the decade was done. The first mission to the Western world had taken place in 1860 when a large group of Japanese traveled to the United States aboard the Kanrinmaru to ratify the Treaty of Kanagawa imposed on Japan by Townsend Harris (1804–1878). They allegedly navigated the Dutch-built vessel themselves, although accompanied by the American naval officer John Mercer Brooke (1826–1906) and effectively convoyed with the USS Powhatan. On the diplomatic front, 1862 began well with the first Japanese embassy to Europe setting sail from Shinagawa on January 21.

Nonetheless, the last fifteen years of the shogunate witnessed numerous assassinations of reformist or high-ranking samurai, and virtually anyone in government who was prepared to yield at all before the Western powers or appear even slightly to contradict an imperial command risked being mercilessly cut down. A British merchant by the name of Charles Lennox Richardson (1834–1862) was on his way home to London from his commercial base in Shanghai when he stopped over in Yokohama. On a sightseeing tour with three other Westerners on September 14, he was attacked and killed by a member of the retinue of a Satsuma domainal person of importance for failing to yield the right of way. Despite being protected under extraterritoriality, his behavior was perceived as disrespectful and deemed cause for his murder near the village of Namamugi, now part of Yokohama. The incident led to serious diplomatic and military repercussions for Japan.⁴

The year 1862 was, as noted, slated to be different from all other years, despite being so similar in many other ways. The alternate attendance system, a defining characteristic of the Tokugawa political settlement, came to an end in October; with the opening of several ports a few years earlier, that effectively was a resounding death knell for the Tokugawa regime, as it had constituted itself in the seventeenth century. Yet, many regimes have historically reformed themselves institutionally into something that would be unrecognizable to earlier figures in them. In other words, it may not have been inevitable and it certainly was not crystal clear in 1862, but the Tokugawa regime was in any event not long for this world. That the Qing dynasty would last exactly another half century, especially after surviving the Taiping Rebellion, was, indeed, something of a miracle, and it too would be overthrown by a revolution while in the process of fundamentally reforming itself.

It is important neither to overstate nor underestimate the significance of the voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai. Chinese and Japanese had been meeting all through the previous three centuries. Those interactions were the result primarily of Chinese merchant vessels sailing to Nagasaki and were mediated by the rigid system placed on them upon arrival in that port, the only one open to them, but the image of Japan as a closed country has now been shown to be greatly exaggerated when applied to the entire Tokugawa era. Many Chinese artists, painters, doctors, and other professionals sailed on those merchant ships and visited Nagasaki for shorter or longer periods of time, and there they frequently met with their Japanese counterparts.⁵ There were as well a relatively small number of Japanese who inadvertently ended up in China due to their fishing ships being blown off course or in some other way becoming castaways. Many of them perished at sea, and few were ever able to repatriate. There were also a small but not insignificant number of Zen monks who came to China throughout the period of otherwise interdicted travel.

What made the 1862 meeting different was the official nature of the event. The Japanese aboard the Senzaimaru were largely a motley, if fascinating, crew, but there was also a team of shogunal officials aboard charged with meeting their Chinese counterparts and assessing the possibilities for opening commercial and perhaps diplomatic ties down the road. Although laden with merchandise, the Senzaimaru was not terribly successful commercially during its sojourn in Shanghai, but on the state-to-state front it did far better, and the latter was its primary mission. The Qing regime wanted to restrict diplomatic relations and turned down the Japanese request for a consulate in Shanghai; nonetheless, the 1862 meeting proved the initial first step in a process leading not only to the first modern treaty between the two countries, the Treaty of Amity of 1871, but to the first completely equal treaty in the system of international law within East Asia. And, with it would eventually come a consulate.

We begin by looking at the prehistory of the Senzaimaru, the vessel that brought the Japanese to Shanghai. In the early 1860s, the Japanese had no oceangoing vessels; indeed, they had no need for any. So, where did this ship come from? We move then to examine the planning undertaken by the bakufu (shogunal government) and local officials in Nagasaki (and, to a lesser extent, Hakodate) and to assess who the Japanese on board were and how they were so privileged. We shall also describe the perilous voyage they made to Shanghai in the late spring of 1862.

Once in Shanghai, the major Japanese players fan out to examine this city each in his own way, although often in small groups. The shogunal officials have several meetings with the local circuit intendant and with their intermediary, a Dutch businessman and diplomat by the name of Theodorus Kroes (1822–1889). Others search out as much information as possible on the Taiping Rebellion, while yet others (some making purchases) assess the market opportunities that Shanghai, and extrapolating to China more generally, might present Japan. From those who have left us accounts of their experiences, we know of numerous conversations (done by brush, as will be explained later in detail) with Chinese in their efforts to get answers to their countless questions.

With a close reading of their writings and especially their interactions with Chinese, we can proceed to identify the concerns that most troubled or simply consumed the Japanese: opium use, Christianity, the Western powers, Taiping rebels, and other pressing issues. In every instance, they were actually more focused on the future of Japan as viewed through the mirror of China. All the ills witnessed in China were to become negative object lessons for the Japanese.

One murky question we need to pose from the outset, though by no means at all easy to resolve, is just how they conceived of themselves. Were they present on this mission as representatives of their respective domains? Or, did they think of themselves as Japanese nationals? In clearly discernible instances, several of them acted first and foremost on behalf of their domains, and there was no love lost between many of them and the shogunal officials representing the bakufu aboard the Senzaimaru. There are, however, any number of instances—especially when finding fault with China’s apparent weaknesses and subservience to the Westerners—when they compared themselves as Japanese favorably to their hosts. When three of the crew members died in Shanghai, several authors of travel narratives wrote puzzlingly about how to deal with death away from home, a problem many generations of Japanese had not had to consider. There was no way to transport them home, and their bodies were cremated and buried far from their family and ancestors. What Japan meant to them is difficult to extract, but it was as much a cultural entity, a body with a history, as it was not a modern nation-state with a modern military, centralized government, and uniform educational system—not (as yet) by a long ways.⁶

The ills they perceived among the Chinese and what they took to be ineffective responses to them did not lead the Japanese—at least those who wrote about their trip—to belittle or impugn the integrity of the Chinese people or culture. They may have hated the Qing regime or even pitied the Chinese, and they certainly disagreed with many of the measures being taken by the Chinese authorities, but there is no evidence that this voyage marks the beginning of Japanese denigration of China and the Chinese. If they found fault with China and the Chinese, the metaphor of a younger, healthier sibling wanting to see an older sibling recuperate his or her strength and former prowess would be more fitting.

The circuit intendant of Shanghai made it clear that the Senzaimaru would be allowed to stay in Shanghai only long enough to dispose of its cargo, and then promptly make its way back to Japan, and the Japanese were not to rashly attempt another unannounced entrance into any Chinese port. With their foot in the door, though, there was no denying the Japanese subsequent entrée to China. They were back less than two years later, and we shall look at the mission of the Kenjunmaru in late winter of 1864 and other early contacts. By the end of the decade the stage was set for full diplomatic ties, and all in the space of less than a decade. By then our story will be winding down.

Scholarship on the voyage of the Senzaimaru was pioneered by the groundbreaking work of Okita Hajime (1905–1985). As a student in the 1920s at Kyoto Imperial University, Okita majored in English and American literature, especially the novels of Henry James (1843–1916), whose often turgid style apparently proved no impediment to Okita—he would later translate two works by and pen two studies of the Anglo-American author.⁷ In January 1933 he accepted a job teaching English at the Japanese Senior High School for Girls in Shanghai, a school established by the Japanese Residents Association of Shanghai (Nihon kyoryū mindan) or JRA in 1920.⁸ In February 1942 he moved over to the Shanghai Senior Commercial School for Girls, also established by the JRA (in 1940).⁹

As he became an upstanding member of the Japanese community of Shanghai, he became increasingly disappointed in the inexplicable lack of interest of his fellow Shanghai Japanese in the history of their own community and the apparent irrelevance of it to their lives. It was as if they were in a holding pattern, just waiting for the correct moment to return to Japan and start a proper life where it truly mattered, a pattern not unlike that of other expatriate communities in China and elsewhere (referred to by some as perpetually sitting on one’s suitcases or never unpacking one’s suitcases). He wrote many articles for the Japanese press in Shanghai, especially Tairiku shinpō (Mainland news) over the 1939–1945 period, and in the spring of 1941 he led the way in launching the Shanghai History and Geography Research Group (Shanhai rekishi chiri kenkyūkai). Although Okita appears to have done the lion’s share of the group’s work, one senior figure was Ashizawa Shunnosuke (1907–1985). Ashizawa, born in the city, had left to study in Japan, but then returned to Shanghai and lived there for many years, running the family printing business inherited from his father, Ashizawa Tamiji (b. 1875), who had settled in Shanghai in 1903. The objectives of Okita’s research group were to investigate sites around the city of concern to Japanese history there, collect documents, publish research in various ways, and hold periodic meetings, workshops, and exhibitions; an office was set up in the headquarters of the Japanese Youth Association with Ashizawa in charge of cultural affairs.¹⁰

Throughout the early 1940s, Okita produced a stunning quantity of high-quality scholarship. To be sure, he had extraordinary access to materials and his linguistic background was perfectly suited to the topics at hand—in addition to the high level of his English, often necessary to understand the idiosyncratic prose of articles in the North-China Herald and the Chinese Repository from the nineteenth century, he was equally adept in literary Chinese and many varieties of Japanese. He first tackled the origins and history of Shanghai toponyms and changing street names, which led to a short volume, and that project soon took him into the entire history of the Japanese community of Shanghai.¹¹ Over the summer of 1941 he traveled to his alma mater in Kyoto to visit the eminent linguist and scholar Shinmura Izuru (1876–1967); he presented Shinmura with his volume on place names, and Shinmura gave him a copy of his own recently published collections of essays entitled Ensei sōkō (Studies of the far west). Okita then traveled on to visit Mutō Chōzō (1881–1942) at Nagasaki Senior Commercial School (now Nagasaki University); Mutō had published in the 1920s several important studies on the earliest Japanese ventures to visit China during the 1860s, and he gave Okita a manuscript copy of the diary of one of the Senzaimaru travelers to China, Matsudaya Hankichi.¹²

The first fruits of his group’s research were collected in Shanhai kenkyū (Shanghai studies), published in February 1942 in what was to become a periodical, although no subsequent issues ever appeared. Okita’s first comprehensive study was published there, as was the Matsudaya diary. The publisher was the famed Uchiyama Bookstore, owned since 1917 by Uchiyama Kanzō (1885–1959), who was just as famous as the close friend of Lu Xun (1881–1936). As background reading, Okita began assiduously to read back issues of the North-China Herald at the library of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. When the Pacific War commenced at the end of 1941, this site was closed by the Japanese army, and Okita began to use a library in the Xujiahui section of the city now under Japanese occupation. This research led him to write a short book, entitled Shanhai hōjin shi kenkyū (Studies of the history of Japanese in Shanghai), which appeared in May 1942 and was only printed in thirty copies.¹³

Although only thirty-seven years of age, in September 1942 Okita quit his teaching post and assumed a position as researcher for the Kachū kō-A shiryō chōsajo (The Asian development document research institute of central China), which was established by the Japanese government in November of that year. Now a full-time researcher, he published his major study, Kojō shi dan: Shanhai ni kansuru shiteki zuihitsu (Tales from the history of Shanghai: Historical notes about Shanghai), in December and Nihon to Shanhai (Japan and Shanghai) with the same publisher the following December.¹⁴

Okita continued to work for this research outfit until August 1945, and he was briefly employed as an interpreter by the Japanese military police, perhaps not by his own choice but in any event guaranteed not to stand him in the best stead in the immediate postwar era. He was repatriated to Japan in March 1946 after thirteen years spent in Shanghai. Although he would occasionally thereafter publish something concerned with the topics that had so consumed him in the first half of the 1940s, he effectively stopped doing so after the war. He wrote mostly from that point about British literature and published several textbooks for teaching the English language. His last position was at Ryūkoku University in Kyoto (1976–1981).¹⁵

He was not the first scholar to address the issue of the Senzaimaru, but over the course of his intensive research on Japanese connections to the city of Shanghai, he addressed it any number of times, and his two-part article of 1947 opened the postwar academic study of this topic.¹⁶ The fact that the story of the Senzaimaru is as well known in Japan as it is unknown elsewhere owes much to Okita’s pioneering work. The story in Japan has been treated in historical fiction and portrayed in television dramas (see Chapter 10), though outside Japan it remains to be told, with some Chinese scholars beginning in recent years to address the topic.¹⁷

I have myself written several essays on the voyage of the Senzaimaru over the past two decades, and this volume is built upon their foundation and on all the Chinese and especially Japanese scholarship that has been produced since.¹⁸ I was also able to make a few discoveries of my own while using the archives of the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in Greenwich, England, and in communication with archivists in the Netherlands. The relatively recent discovery of official Chinese documents deriving from the meetings of the Japanese shogunal officials with the circuit intendant of Shanghai and their translation into Japanese have been an entirely salutary addition to the scholarly materials available. In this sense, then, the fact that the reading and writing necessary for the completion of this book have taken so long has been accompanied by beneficial by-products.

Thanks are due to all the men and women in the Netherlands who answered my e-mail messages and letters, and especially to Herman Moeshart for providing me with the letters (and their translations) used in Chapter 1 and information cited elsewhere, and to Wil Furrer-Kroes, the Kroes family genealogist, who provided me with a five-generation chart ending with Theodorus and his children. Thanks as well to Michel Hockx, Hans van de Ven, and Anna Korteweg for help with individual Dutch terms. Also, special thanks are due to my old friend Peter Zarrow, who saw to it that I received a full set of the indispensable documents from the Zongli Yamen archives, used primarily in Chapter 9. Thanks are due as well to Kirk Larsen and Richard Rigby, the two readers for the University of California Press, both of whom provided helpful comments. And, thanks as well go to Robert Bickers and the University of Bristol for facilitating use of the image on the cover.

A note on the appendix. In order to make the text as transparent as possible, I included at an earlier stage as much of the original texts immediately following their citations as I could; this includes the various travel writings of the Japanese aboard the Senzaimaru and the official Chinese memoranda that went up and down the food chain in the Qing bureaucracy, among other such writings. These have now been removed to an appendix, and alphabetic note references can be found in the text following the translated citations.

I am dedicating this book to Philip A. Kuhn and Akira Iriye, my first teachers of East Asian history at the University of Chicago over forty years ago and consistent supporters of my work over these decades. When they left Chicago for another university, they broke the mold.

ONE

Line

The Armistice, Shanghai, and the Facilitator

BECAUSE OF THE TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE’S BAN on sea travel on pain of execution for over two centuries, by the 1860s Japanese had little training available for building or sailing ocean-worthy vessels. Fishing boats along the coastal waters of the archipelago and along inland rivers were certainly present, but these boats could never sail far on the ocean and their size was restricted. Those that lost their mainsails or were for some other reason castaway from shore were lucky to be picked up at sea by foreign sailors; they, then, often found it difficult or, indeed, impossible to return to Japan because, through no fault of their own, they had violated the ban on sea travel.

When the large party of Japanese sailed aboard the Kanrinmaru to the United States to ratify the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1860,¹ the accords that had been signed aboard the USS Powhatan in 1858, this was the first time that any Japanese—there were a total of ninety-six Japanese nationals in the shogunal party—had purposefully crossed an ocean. It would still be several years before they would actually navigate the vessel entirely by themselves.

Traveling to and from mainland Asia or to the islands in Southeast Asia was considerably less difficult, though certainly treacherous at times, and indeed Japanese had sailed for commercial, cultural, and religious reasons to China and Korea over the course of many centuries—though not always with navigational success—from at least the first century of the Common Era. They had also traveled to many places in the Philippines, Viêt Nam, Champa, and Cambodia. Those precocious seagoing efforts, however, came to an abrupt end in the middle of the seventeenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth the Japanese had considerable catch-up to play in the field of navigation.

Although they took to it like gangbusters and had in fact been keen observers of foreign ships and navigational techniques in the years leading up to the opening of ports, when the Japanese government set out on its own in the early 1860s to establish commercial and diplomatic ties with China, they were still not quite ready to go it alone. Within two years’ time, though, they would be. And, even when they eventually could sail a ship on the open seas, they remained a fair distance from being able to build one.

Thus, the Japanese government’s decision to launch the first mission across a large body of water—cart before horse, one might say—preceded the ability to build or navigate a ship on such a voyage. The Western powers were forcing themselves on Japan, and the shogunate wanted at all cost to avoid the fate already visited on China. Even with limited access to information about the outside world, the principal lesson learned from China’s resistance to Western pressure and subsequent losses in fighting and sovereignty was simple: join the club before the members brand you as one of those others. One of the leaders of the Liberal Party, Sugita Teiichi (1851–1929), put it most succinctly after an 1884 visit to China: Westerners have come [to East Asia], fighting for their interests, each wanting to assert hegemony. We lie within the contested sphere and are wondering if we should be their main course or if we should move forward and join the guests at the table. It is certainly better to sit at the table than to be served as the entrée.a, ²

PREHISTORY OF THE SENZAIMARU

Before the Senzaimaru existed as such, there was a British vessel named the Armistice. Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping for 1856 lists the Armistice for the first time: no. 875, owned by one J. Longton, destined voyage: Sld. S. Amer. (in other words, moving between Sunderland in Great Britain and South America). It had been constructed in 1855 in the shipyard of one R. Wilkinson in the major British shipbuilding center of Sunderland on the northeast coast of England.³ There is a slightly earlier record of the Armistice in the daily Lloyd’s List (now extant solely in hundreds of pages in a handwritten edition on microfiche at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England), a daily accounting of all British ships sighted in ports around the globe. It puts the Armistice at the port of Deal on the English Channel about eighty miles east of London, arrived on July 30, 1855, and set to sail for Montevideo (capital of the then-young country of Uruguay); its master’s name is given as Peace (H. Peace in subsequent editions of Lloyd’s Register).

Over the next three years, this information remained fairly stable. It was listed as a barque (also spelled bark), a relatively small, oceangoing, square-rigged vessel with three masts. It weighed 358 tons—sometimes given as 374 tons, but this must represent additional material taken on board—was sheathed with yellow metal and marine metal, and measured 111 feet, 5 inches in length, 25 feet, 5 inches in breadth, and 16 feet in depth.⁴

We glean from Lloyd’s List over its first few years that the Armistice’s circumstances were slowly beginning to change. As early as 1856 it was sailing not only between Deal and Gravesend (at the mouth of the Thames River east of London) and South America, but to Colombo, capital of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) off the coast of India, Table Bay (near Cape Town, South Africa), and the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; in 1857 it added Cochin (along the west coast of India), and other ports as well. The ship’s captain is occasionally given as Pearse, though this may be a misprint.⁵

From mid-December 1858, when it was at Gravesend, through early November 1859, when it was spotted at Deal and departing for San Francisco, the Armistice simply disappears from the records of Lloyd’s List. It may have put in for repairs, or simply evaded notice, though the latter is less likely. In Lloyd’s Register for 1859 it was listed as belonging to the port of Liverpool. The change of principal ports from which it operated may have had to do with a change in owners—now a J. Sullivan. Its destined voyage was given as Lon. C.G.H. (London–Cape of Good Hope), and its master as H. Peace. For the first time, on November 2, 1859, Lloyd’s List gives Richardson as the ship’s captain, and we learn as well that