A Japanese Artist Shows an American Ship

I couldn't resist using this print. It shows an American steamship, sometime after Commodore Matthew Perry arrived off the Japanese town of Uraga, near Edo Bay in 1853. Perry led a small fleet of four ships, and his mission was to persuade--or force--the Japanese to open their ports to American trade. Perry's flagship, the Susquehanna, was partly powered by steam, and the Japanese had never seen a steamship (indicated in the above print by the clouds of smoke coming from a smokestack). Nor had they seen any weapons like Perry's cannons, which he fired off as a demonstration of his ship's power. Word was carried back to the shogun, and he made the fateful decision to accept Perry's demands. It was the beginning of the end for Japan's long isolation from the rest of the world. The artist of this print probably never saw one of Perry's ships, so he painted it with faces fore and aft, the way Chinese did on their ships.