The Embassy at the Washington D.C. shipyard: Vice-Ambassador Muragaki Norimasa (third from left), Ambassador Shinmi Masaoki (middle), and Oguri Tadamasa (second from right)
17 th March 1860 - Japanese embassy arrives in America aboard Kanrin Maru
The Japanese Embassy to the United States was dispatched in 1860 by the Tokugawa bakufu
(a feudal regime of Japan established by Tokugawa Ieyasu and ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family).
Its objective was to ratify the new Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation
between the United States and Japan, in addition to being Japan’s first diplomatic mission
to the United States since the 1854 opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry.
Another significant facet of the mission was the bakufu’s dispatch of a Japanese warship, the Kanrin Maru,
to accompany the delegation across the Pacific and thereby demonstrate the degree
to which Japan had mastered Western navigation techniques and ship technologies
barely six years after ending its isolation policy of nearly 250 years.
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Kanrin Maru, Japan's first screw-driven steam warship, 1855.
On January 19, 1860, the Kanrin Maru set sail from Uraga for San Francisco
under the leadership of Captain Katsu Kaishu, John Manjiro, and Fukuzawa Yukichi
with 96 Japanese men and an American officer, John M. Brooke, on board.
Fukuzawa had volunteered his services to Admiral Kimura Yoshitake
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USS Powhatan was a sidewheel steam frigate
The Japanese embassy itself traveled aboard a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Powhatan, which the Kanrin Maru escorted.
The Japanese embassy was formally composed of three men:
Ambassador Shinmi Masaoki, Vice-Ambassador Muragaki Norimasa and Observer Oguri Tadamasa.
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The three plenipotentiary members of the Japanese embassy:
Shinmi Masaoki, Muragaki Norimasa, and Oguri Tadamasa.
The Kanrin Maru reached San Francisco directly, but the Powhatan (and the embassy) made a stopover in Hawaii first.
When it arrived in San Francisco, the delegation stayed for a month, and Fukuzawa
had himself photographed with an American girl, a photo that has since become one of the most famous in Japanese history.
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Fukuzawa Yukichi with Theodora Alice in San Francisco, 1860.
Fukuzawa also acquired an English–Chinese Webster’s Dictionary, from which he began
to seriously study English and prepare his own English–Japanese dictionary.
When the Kanrin Maru returned to Japan, the Powhatan continued with the Embassy to Panama,
where its members crossed the isthmus to the Atlantic via the recently opened Panama Railway.
Changing ships for the USS Niagara, the Embassy then proceeded to Washington, D.C..
Numerous receptions were held in its honor, including one at the White House,
where the diplomats met President James Buchanan.
Later the Embassy went on to New York, then crossed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans,
all on board the Niagara, thus completing a circumnavigation.
Leaving New York on June 30, the Niagara called at Porto Grande, Cape Verde Islands;
Sao Paulo-de-Loande (now Luanda), Angola; Batavia (now Djakarta), Java; and Hong Kong.
The frigate finally sailed into Tokyo Bay on November 8 to disembark her passengers.
Sailors 9ncl. captains of the Kanrin Maru, the Embassy's escort;
from right, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Okada Seizō, Hida Hamagorō,
Konagai Gohachirō, Hamaguchi Yoemon, Nezu Kinjirō.
Kanrin Maru was Japan's first sail and screw-driven steam corvette
(the first steam-driven Japanese warship, Kanko Maru, was a side-wheeler).
She was ordered in 1853 from the Netherlands, the only Western country
with which Japan had diplomatic relations throughout its period of sakoku (seclusion),
by the Shogun's government, the Bakufu.
She was delivered on September 21, 1857 (with the name Japan), barely three years after the forcible opening
of Japan to trade by Commodore Perry, by lt. Willem Huyssen van Kattendijke of the Dutch navy.
The ship was used at the newly established Naval School of Nagasaki
in order to build up knowledge of Western warship technology.
Kanrin Maru, as a screw-driven steam warship, represented a new technological advance
in warship design which had been introduced in the West only ten years earlier with HMS Rattler (1843).
The ship was built by the shipyard of Fop Smit at Kinderdijk in the Netherlands,
where the virtually identical screw-steamship with schooner-rig Bali of the Dutch navy was also built in 1856.
She allowed Japan to get its first experience with some of the newest advances in ship design.
The Kanrin Maru’s voyage from Uraga to San Francisco is often cited as the first crossing
of the Pacific by an all-Japanese crew sailing a Japanese ship, although the crew was advised by John M. Brooke.
However, the Kanrin Maru’s was not the first Pacific crossing by a Japanese ship and crew:
at least three such journeys had been made in the 17th century, before Japan's period of isolation:
those by Tanaka Shōsuke in 1610, Hasekura Tsunenaga in 1614, and Yokozawa Shōgen in 1616.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Embassy_to_the_United_States_(1860)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanrin_Maru
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Powhatan_(1850)