Uraga and Kurihama: Receiving the Letter, Reserving the Answer

The men appointed to receive the American president's letter were not authorized to discuss its demands. This limitation appeared repeatedly in the negotiations before Commodore Matthew Perry went ashore at Kurihama on July 14, 1853. The Americans wanted a recipient whose standing matched the importance of their mission. Japanese officials wanted the act of receiving a document kept separate from the act of answering it.^[1]

Making that distinction work required much more than an agreed sentence. Someone had to board the ships, translate the exchanges, establish acceptable credentials, prepare a place on shore, and decide what would happen inside it. Even the receipt became part of the negotiation.

Uraga and Kurihama preserve the geography of those different tasks. Uraga was the working administrative port through which the first exchanges passed. Kurihama, beyond the intervening coastal hills, supplied the landing ground and temporary reception hall. The movement between them turned a confrontation offshore into a tightly bounded meeting.

Perry's four ships appeared off Uraga on July 8. They had approached the maritime entrance to Edo, the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate—the warrior government then conducting Japan's foreign affairs. They had not arrived at a coast without an institution responsible for what happened there.^[2]

Uraga's magistrate office had moved from Shimoda in 1720. Its responsibilities included inspecting shipping and administering the surrounding communities. During the early nineteenth century, duties concerning foreign vessels and coastal defense were added. The same office consequently had to handle both continuing port business and arrivals whose demands could not be settled locally.^[3]

That combination required practical support. Yamamoto Shōichi's account of the compound identifies a cooking facility used when foreign-ship business kept officials working through the night. It also supplied rice to local fishermen who rowed the official boats. This describes an arrangement for handling arrivals, rather than a menu recovered from Perry's particular visit.^[4]

The fishermen belong in the explanation because contact depended on repeated movement across water. An instruction written on land did not reach a ship by itself. A boarding party needed a boat and people able to take it out; those people, and the officers working ashore, needed to be fed. The office's ability to respond was partly a capacity to keep these movements going.

Perry's arrival put a different pressure on that existing organization. A local officer could identify himself and deliver a message, but the foreign commander could refuse to recognize his standing. The first obstacle was therefore not a complete absence of communication. It was disagreement over who was entitled to conduct it.

The expedition's official American narrative describes boats gathering around the ships and an initial Japanese request that the Americans go to Nagasaki. Perry's party rejected that destination. His message was for the government near Edo, and he would not transfer the mission to the established port for foreign intercourse.^[5]

The account also describes a carefully managed absence. Perry remained apart while subordinates handled the first exchanges. They insisted that a sufficiently senior Japanese official must appear. His physical withdrawal helped make rank a condition of access to him.

On the Japanese side, titles were adjusted to keep contact possible. Nakajima Saburosuke was presented as a vice-governor, although Uraga's administration had no such office. Kayama Eizaemon, a subordinate official, subsequently appeared as the governor. Yokosuka City's historical account distinguishes these represented titles from the men's actual positions.^[6]

The result was not a shared understanding of two equivalent hierarchies. It was a working arrangement under which messages could pass. Kayama could continue consulting his superiors while satisfying, for the moment, an American demand about the person speaking to them.

Language complicated that arrangement. Hori Tatsunosuke, the Japanese interpreter, could communicate in Dutch. On the American side, Anton Portman supplied the corresponding ability. The expedition also carried the interpreter S. Wells Williams, whose work included Chinese. In the first encounter described by the American account, Dutch became the usable channel after Hori's brief English introduction.^[5]

Even the commander's title had to fit that channel. The American narrative explains that its party used “admiral” rather than “commodore” because the interpreters understood the former term.^[7] Translation here included choosing a recognizable category of office, not simply finding a different word for an agreed position.

This language operated under naval pressure. Perry's officers demanded that the surrounding boats withdraw and threatened to disperse them by force. The narrative records the departure of most boats after Japanese instructions were issued. Neither the exchange of words nor the withdrawal erased the armed setting in which the provisional arrangements were being made.

Once a landing became possible, the order of documents presented another difficulty. The Americans possessed the original presidential letter and translations. They wanted an appropriately authorized recipient before surrendering the original. Japanese officers wanted to avoid a procedure requiring repeated journeys to collect separate parts of the same communication.^[8]

The disagreement concerned what each preliminary act would establish. A translation could make the contents known without completing the formal delivery. A credential could identify a receiver without authorizing him to bargain over those contents. The papers performed different jobs, even though all belonged to the same mission.

In the negotiations of July 12, the Americans agreed that originals and translations could be delivered together, provided that the receiving officer's standing had first been demonstrated. A written arrangement, supplied in Dutch, described an official corresponding in rank to the American commander. It also restricted the encounter: the commissioners would receive the documents, but there would be no substantive discussion.^[8]

Kayama returned the following afternoon with the credentials. According to the expedition's account, an original document was kept in a box and shown without being handed over for inspection; a Dutch copy and a statement of its authenticity were supplied. The authority it described was specific: receive the letter, then take it to Edo.^[9]

The American narrative repeatedly calls Japan's governing authority an emperor. That terminology does not make this an audience with the emperor in Kyoto. The officials involved belonged to the shogunal government, and the receiving commissioners were the Uraga magistrates Toda Ujiyoshi and Ido Hiromichi. Their actual institutional setting is clearer than the grander titles through which the American account presented them.

By this stage, the mission had secured something consequential but limited. Its documents would enter the government's custody through a formal ceremony outside Nagasaki. The recipients, meanwhile, would not have to turn that ceremony into an immediate negotiation over trade or access to ports. Both arrangements had to survive the move ashore.

The receiving place could not be chosen independently of the ships. The Americans preferred a nearer landing and suggested a tent or an existing fortified position. Kayama explained that the appointed site lay beyond the hills and that preparations there had already begun. Moving it would mean undoing work for an encounter that was nearly due.^[10]

The hall thus entered the negotiation before Perry entered the hall. A structure prepared on land gave the Japanese side a practical reason to maintain its proposed location. To the Americans, its distance and relation to the fleet raised a different question: could an armed party be supported once it had landed?

An American officer inspected the site on July 13. The expedition narrative describes a small bay, a building still being completed and furnished, and a position within reach of the ships' guns. The last finding made the proposed ground usable for the American party. Orders then arranged naval support for the landing.^[10]

On July 14, the two steamers moved into positions facing the bay. The expedition's account distinguishes their movement from that of the sailing ships, which did not take the intended stations. The fleet's mixed propulsion mattered to the actual placement of support, rather than only to the impression made by the appearance of steam.^[11]

Japanese boats guided the American flotilla toward shore. A temporary landing arrangement of sand and straw helped connect the water to the approach. Armed men, musicians, officers, interpreters, and the letter-bearers followed a route prepared for this particular meeting.

The preparations connected two kinds of security without making them identical. Japanese officials provided a controlled destination and a receiving party. The Americans kept force close enough to support their movement. The room in which civilities would be exchanged was part of a larger arrangement extending out into the bay.

Inside the reception building, the parties occupied places facing one another. The American narrative describes an outer room, a path leading inward, and a slightly raised inner area. Toda and Ido were seated to receive the mission. Much of the spoken business nevertheless continued through the interpreters and Kayama.^[12]

This distribution of activity explains why the preliminary negotiations had been so important. The commissioners' presence authenticated the reception; they did not need to repeat every arrangement already made aboard ship. In the American account, the two principal Japanese receivers remained silent during the presentation.

The documents arrived with attendants of their own. Two boys carried the rosewood boxes in which the letters had been brought, enclosed with elaborate coverings and seals. At the appointed point, two Black American sailors accompanying Perry took out the letters and presented them for placement on the Japanese receiving box. Portman identified the documents to Hori.^[12]

The ceremony therefore depended on several people doing separate things. A boy could carry a box without being entitled to explain its contents. An interpreter could identify the writing without being the official recipient. The commissioners could receive it without answering the president. The choreography made those distinctions observable, even where the participants did not fully understand one another's ranks.

The objects also crossed a threshold. Before the presentation, the original letters remained in American custody while their delivery was negotiated. After it, Japanese officials possessed the communications that they were to forward. The elaborate covering, procession, and placement made that transfer a public act between representatives, not a paper casually left with whoever would accept it.

The American account estimates that the formal proceedings took only twenty or thirty minutes. That brevity was the product of days spent limiting and arranging them. The encounter did not need to be long to carry a document from a warship into a government's responsibilities.

President Millard Fillmore's letter, written in November 1852, asked for a relationship considerably larger than the ceremony at Kurihama. It proposed trade, humane treatment of shipwrecked Americans, and access to supplies. Coal, water, and provisions were not decorative additions to a general profession of friendship. They were requirements of ships crossing the Pacific.^[13]

The letter made the connection explicit. American steamships, it argued, could not carry enough coal for the whole passage between America and China without replenishment. A supply port in Japan would become useful within a maritime route extending far beyond Uraga. The immediate sight of steam-powered ships thus brought a request for places where steam-powered movement could be sustained.

Fillmore also proposed a temporary experiment with trade if Japanese laws prevented a permanent change. A period of five or ten years, he suggested, could allow the arrangement to be tested. This was a proposal in the letter, not a concession made by the officials receiving it.

The president's assurances about peaceful intentions must likewise be read as part of his communication, rather than as an independent description of everything the expedition was doing. Perry's own accompanying statements connected the requests with his command of a fleet and his intention to return with greater force. Naval capability supplied the pressure behind a formally written invitation to change relations.^[14]

For the receiving commissioners, accepting the documents brought these questions into government deliberation without supplying answers at the receiving table. Kurihama's temporary building had been arranged for that narrower transaction. Nothing in the posture of the two parties, the careful handling of seals, or the existence of interpreters transformed it into a place where all the proposed measures had already been agreed.

A receipt passed back in the other direction. The American narrative preserves two English versions, both presented through Dutch. Its editor thought the first version unsatisfactory and offered another as probably more accurate. Neither should be mistaken for a new, independently checked translation of the Japanese original.^[15]

Their common points nevertheless reveal what the paper was doing. It acknowledged delivery, reaffirmed Nagasaki as the prescribed place for foreign communications, and treated this reception as an exception. It also denied that the occasion was one for further conference. The document recorded an act while attempting to contain its implications.

The wording about departure differs between the versions: one is more peremptory, the other more permissive. That difference matters to tone. It does not turn either version into an agreement to the commercial requests. A receipt was the evidence that the message had reached its destination, not a substitute for the destination's answer.

As the meeting ended, Perry stated that he would return in the following spring, perhaps in April or May, and with more than four ships. Hori asked for the statement to be repeated.^[16] The expedition had deferred an answer, but not withdrawn the demand for one. Its announced return gave the documents a future occasion around which further action would have to be organized.

The agreement eventually signed in 1854 belonged to negotiations at Yokohama, not to this hall at Kurihama. Its provisions included supplying American vessels at Shimoda and Hakodate and assisting shipwrecked people; the broader commercial arrangement followed a different course.^[17] The intervening work should not disappear into the image of Perry first stepping onto the beach.

At Uraga and Kurihama, the result was procedural and provisional. Local officers had made communication possible across incompatible expectations of rank. They had arranged a shore meeting under the guns of the fleet, then given that meeting a limited result. The letter had been received. Deciding what to do about it remained a separate—and much larger—undertaking.