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  President James Polk fomented a conflict Americans called “the Mexican War” (later, “the Mexican-American War”). The Mexicans referred to it as “the U.S. invasion.” Ulysses S. Grant, later a general and president, fought in the war as a young man and wrote in his memoirs that “we were sent to provoke a fight” and that the war was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Mexico was unprepared for the invasion and after two years of slaughter ceded her vast territories of California, New Mexico, and what is now Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and parts of Arizona in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

  On February 2, 1848, just as diplomats from the United States and Mexico were about to sign the treaty, one of the Mexicans turned to American commissioner Nicholas Trist and remarked, “This must be a proud moment for you; no less proud for you than it is humiliating for us.” To this, Commissioner Trist quickly replied, “We are making peace; let that be our only thought.” But Trist later wrote to his wife, “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was far stronger than theirs could be as Mexicans. For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.”

  With new lands on the west coast and excellent new ports as bases, expansionists continued the tradition of gazing westward for opportunity, looking out to America’s far west—the Pacific Ocean.

  To the Americans of the day, the significance of the Pacific meant first and foremost oil. Generations before black crude was tapped from the earth, whale oil greased the gears of the Industrial Revolution and lit the streets of America. Wildcatters from New England roamed for years over the Pacific, which to them was “a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.” Whaling was big business, a major component of the American economy. Herman Melville estimated that by the 1840s the American whaling industry employed 18,000 men aboard 700 ships, reaping a harvest of $7 million annually.

  The whaling business was driven by hardy seamen and entrepreneurs who risked fortunes and life and limb on dangerous multiyear voyages over a scarcely charted wilderness. One of these entrepreneurs was Nathaniel Savory, a Massachusetts native who sailed off to the Pacific in 1814 at the age of twenty. Savory spent ten years in and around Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands), which was the main Pacific base for American crews who increasingly turned their attention to the rich whaling grounds near Japan.

  Realizing a need for provisioning outposts nearer to Japan, Savory—in true manifest destiny Yankee spirit—looked west from Hawaii for a suitable harbor to found his whaling supply enterprise. Whalers stopping in Hawaii told him of a tiny uninhabited island near Japan with natural springs. So in May of 1830, at the age of thirty-six, Nathaniel Savory sailed west from Pearl Harbor with twenty-two other adventurous men and women on a three-thousand-mile-long trip to seek their futures on the beautiful island of Chichi Jima.

  In 1848, Congressman Thomas King of Georgia, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Naval Affairs, held hearings to discuss how America might span the Pacific. The government was already subsidizing four steamship lines in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. A Yankee line across the Pacific would be a significant boon to American commerce. But while steamships could conquer the Atlantic, the Pacific was far too wide.

  The Pacific Ocean is the largest physical feature on the planet. If all the world’s landmasses were placed in the Pacific, there would still be room left over for an additional Africa, Canada, United States, and Mexico. The Pacific is two and one half times larger than the Atlantic Ocean, hiding mountain ranges that dwarf the Himalayas.

  The most compelling witness to testify before Congressman King’s Naval Affairs Committee was the Navy Department’s chief oceanographer, Lieutenant Matthew Maury. Lieutenant Maury placed a large globe before the committee’s congressmen. Maury bent over his satchel and extracted a long piece of white string. He placed one end of the string on San Francisco. Then he ran the string across the blue expanse to the next landfall, the Hawaiian Islands. Steamships had proven their ability to reach Honolulu, 2,100 miles from San Francisco. But it was the next leg, from Honolulu to Shanghai, at 4,700 miles, that posed the big challenge. Marine engines of the time burned so much coal that if enough were brought along to fuel such a long journey, there would be scant room for any other cargo.

  All eyes were fixed on Lieutenant Maury’s globe as he ran the white string from Hawaii to Shanghai. The congressmen could see that the string ran through the Bonin Islands—No Mans Land—on its journey to Shanghai. Maury explained that if they established a coal depot there—perhaps on Chichi Jima—the steam trip to Shanghai was possible. Honolulu to Chichi was a distance of 3,200 miles. After coaling there, a steamship could easily make the last leg from Chichi Jima to Shanghai—a distance of 1,500 miles.

  The implications of this simple demonstration were staggering, Lieutenant Maury explained to the congressmen. A letter, a person, or a pinch of tea now took eighty days to traverse the British route from New York to Shanghai, which went across the Atlantic and around Cape Town, a distance of twenty thousand miles. By exploiting the strategic location of Chichi Jima, the U.S. could reduce the journey’s length by two thirds. “It is in our power to establish and control the most rapid means of communicating with . . . China,” Maury explained to the hushed room. “By establishing the quickest lines of communication to the Orient, the U.S. could break up the [British] channels of commerce [in] the Pacific and turn [these channels] through the U.S.” It was clear to the congressmen that Lieutenant Maury was suggesting no less a prize than commercial domination of the Pacific.

  There was one catch to the plan, however. No Mans Land lay perilously close to Japan. How would Japan react to America establishing a coaling station on Chichi Jima, so near its mainland? Did Japan consider No Mans Land part of its territory?

  Nobody knew.

  Japan was a closed book. Western ignorance of Japan was not the fault of the westerners but the design of the Japanese. For two hundred years, Japan had been shut tight. By national law, a Japanese could not leave Japan and no outsider was allowed in. Death sentences were meted out to any who gave foreigners information about the land of the gods. Almost no maps and no books existed in the English-speaking world describing the closed land.

  Looking back now, what is amazing about the western lack of knowledge is that Japan was not some New Guinea backwater but arguably the most civilized, most urbanized, most highly organized, most literate and peaceful country in the world. Many historians say that Japan was enjoying the planet’s highest standard of living at this time.

  A reliable record of Japan’s imperial rulers dates back to A.D. 300. Japan’s founding fathers finished drafting Japan’s constitution by A.D. 604. Around A.D. 1000, Lady Murasaki penned the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji.

  According to Japan’s “Bible,” the Kojiki—the “Records of Ancient Matters,” it was a female, the sun goddess Amaterasu, who created Japan. Amaterasu peopled it through her descendant Jimmu, Japan’s first earthly emperor. Jimmu was of the Yamato (Mountain People) clan. As emperor, Jimmu’s mission was Hakko Ichiu, which translated as “the eight corners of the world under one roof.” For the Japanese, the “world” was their islands and it was the mission of Jimmu’s Yamato descendants to unite the islands’ peoples under one imperial, holy house.

  Christians were mortals born in sin whose belief in God offered them salvation. But the Japanese had god blood flowing through their veins. They had a direct connect to the heavens. The Americans might refer to their land as “blessed by God,” but the Japanese were living in the “land of the gods.”

  All a Japanese had to do to affirm his belief that his land was blessed above all was open his eyes in the morning. There it was, goddess Amaterasu’s sun rising over the Pacific isla
nds, then proceeding over Japan and on to the rest of the world. Japan provided the world with light. (Japan’s name for itself—Nippon—expresses this concept with ni, meaning “sun,” and pon, meaning “origin.” Thus Japan is the “Land of the Rising Sun.”)

  Isolated on an island archipelago, with no other peoples or foreign creeds to challenge their beliefs, generations of Japanese intensified the idea of Japan as the chosen land. But the gods could not keep peace within Japan, and for centuries civil wars raged. While the never-seen emperor lay secluded and impotent in his palace, a series of military dictators ruled. Finally, in 1600, the skilled warrior Ieyasu Tokugawa vanquished his enemies, emerged preeminent, and consolidated his control over the country.

  Ieyasu Tokugawa was a visionary who dreamed of bringing eternal peace to Japan and establishing the House of Tokugawa to rule for the ages. To accomplish his goals, the shrewd Tokugawa did nothing less than remake the Japanese state and national character.

  First, he had himself declared supreme ruler, or shogun, by the emperor. The emperor—who was an invisible nonentity to the ordinary Japanese—reigned from the ancient capital of Kyoto but did not rule. Instead, he was a virtual prisoner of the current military dictator. The shogun perpetuated the myth of imperial rule in exchange for having legitimacy conferred upon him. Tokugawa’s title “shogun” is translated as “barbarian-expelling generalissimo.” And the current barbarians were the Christians of the West.

  The Japanese word for foreigner is gaizin. The prefix gai means “outside,” and zin means “person.” All foreigners were gaizin—“outside people.” The term implied not just that gaizin were from outside Japan, but also that they were outside the human race. Gaizin weren’t just semihuman but nonhuman. This idea is captured by an anonymous account of the landing of a gaizin ship on Japanese shores during Tokugawa’s time:

  From this ship emerged an unnamable creature, somewhat similar in shape to a human being, but looking rather like a long-nosed goblin. Upon close investigation, it was discovered that this was a being called a “Padre.” The length of the nose was the first thing which attracted attention: it was like a conch shell attached by suction to his face. His head was small; on his hands and feet he had long claws, his teeth were longer than the teeth of a horse. What he was could not be understood at all; his voice was like the screech of an owl. One and all rushed out to see him, crowding all the roads.

  When Portuguese missionaries had first landed in Japan in 1543, they found the Japanese naturally curious, hospitable, and highly refined. The missionaries were welcomed and their conversion efforts were tolerated. The missionary Saint Francis Xavier remarked, “I know not when to cease in speaking of the Japanese. They are truly the delight of my heart.” By the time of Ieyasu Tokugawa’s ascension as shogun, Portuguese and Spanish missionaries had made more than 300,000 converts in Japan. But Tokugawa noticed something was very different about this barbarian religion from the West.

  Shintoism, the native animist religion of Japan, and Buddhism, which had been imported from India via China, were inclusionary faiths. One could bow before a Shinto shrine one minute and recite a Buddhist sutra the next with no conflict. But the Christian missionaries demanded that a choice be made. Christianity excluded other beliefs. Tokugawa soon became suspicious of a religion whose very First Commandment required loyalty to one jealous, non-Japanese god.

  Tokugawa had also heard stories of how other countries had been subjugated after allowing missionaries in. As one Japanese writer observed, “When those barbarians plan to subdue a country they start by opening commerce and watch for a sign of weakness. If an opportunity is presented they will preach their alien religion to captivate the people’s hearts. Once the people’s allegiance has been shifted, they can be manipulated and nothing can be done to stop it.”

  Convinced that he could not establish a stable peace if the people’s allegiance was to a gaizin god, in 1614, Tokugawa ordered all missionaries banished. Japanese Christians were given the choice of treading on a crucifix and renouncing the gaizin religion or being crucified themselves. Soon the West became synonymous with Christianity and any contact with gaizin was seen as a threat to Japan. The crucifix was a symbol of evil and Christ was referred to as “the devil of Japan.” Foreign trade was abolished except through the Dutch, who agreed to be isolated from the Japanese populace and confined to a small prisonlike artificial island in Nagasaki Bay. Only one Dutch ship a year would enter Japan. And the Dutch traders were required to regularly step on a crucifix.

  With the gaizin gone, Japan became an ideologically sealed archipelago. Shogun Tokugawa created a brilliant plan to bring eternal peace to the land of the gods. He rejiggered Japan’s social order, decreeing a strictly hierarchal society with the military class—samurai—on top. Tokugawa ensured that his public servants were noble samurai who led with integrity. Their selfless leadership earned the loyalty of the people. Japanese society came to prize military virtues above all, and the preeminent virtue was strict obedience to the dominant military class. Woe to any mere mortal who did not instantly obey his military masters. “The Tokugawa code was clear: ‘Common people who behave unbecomingly to members of the military class . . . may be cut down on the spot.’”

  The House of Tokugawa’s farsighted reordering of Japanese society resulted in Taihai, the “Great Peace”—over two hundred fifty years of Tokugawa family rule and no wars. For two and a half centuries, there was no Japanese army or Japanese navy. There was no need for large-scale military force. Tokugawa’s system guaranteed that no external or internal conflicts would occur. It was an extraordinary stretch of absolute peace unmatched by any other nation over a comparable period of time.

  The traditional arts for which Japan is now known flourished during the Great Peace. But the Japanese people forfeited all personal liberties in exchange for this unprecedented stability. There were thousands of rules of personal etiquette. “Laws listed two hundred and sixteen varieties of dress for everyone from the lowest serf to the emperor. The size, shape and color of the stitches were specified. What they could buy at the market, the types of houses they were allowed to build, whom they must bow to, the types of dolls children could play with, where a person could travel—laws imposed from on high governed the tiniest details of life in Japan.”

  Japan became the most regimented society in the world. Life was not about independent action or striking out on one’s own, but recognizing one’s “proper place” in the flywheel of society. Patterns of thought were firmly established. Proper decorum was more rigorously observed in Japan than in any other country in the world. This allowed a large population to live on cramped islands with little friction, but it also resulted in a people unusually dependent upon known rules of conduct and orders from above.

  The Japanese population in 1850, thirty-one million people, was larger than that of the United States, at twenty-three million. Although no one realized it at the time, Tokyo (then called Edo) had become the world’s largest and most vibrant city, with a population of over one million. (This at a time when Washington, D.C., had a population of thirty-five thousand, and pigs and chickens roamed the streets.) Japan was the most urbanized country in the world, with almost 7 percent of its population living in cities, compared with 2 percent in Europe. By many measures, Japan had the highest standard of living in the world, with a nationwide system of roads, a national marketing system, and “majestic citadels, many exceeding in size the largest castles built in medieval Europe” that “loomed over the countryside as awesome symbols of their prodigious strength.”

  In June of 1851, the thirteenth president of the United States met with U.S. Navy officials in the Oval Office to consider American expansion in the Pacific. By now, President Millard Fillmore was well aware of Lieutenant Maury’s argument regarding the San Francisco-Honolulu- No Mans Land-Shanghai route. But Fillmore had political concerns. Americans were focused on digesting their recently acquired continental empire. The advantages of P
acific trade were not much of a hot button to a country with most of its citizenry still in the east. San Francisco’s total population was under seven hundred people, and the entire Oregon territory held fewer than one thousand Americans.

  But ambitious navy officers presented President Fillmore the political cover to establish a steamship route through Japan. It was an official report that would outrage the chattering classes and provide the pretext for the executive branch to project military might directly to No Mans Land and Japan. The report’s name was “Documents Relative to the Empire of Japan.” It detailed how the Japanese had treated a shipwrecked crew of American whalemen in an “inhumane and barbaric” fashion. A navy captain assured President Fillmore that “the facts of that case are of a character to excite the indignation of the people of the United States.” The captain told Fillmore, “The nation stands upon strong vantage ground. We want accommodations for fuel and a depot for our steamers and we have a good cause for a quarrel.”

  A good cause for a quarrel. Congress had been slow to act on Maury’s call for a Pacific steamship line, but when President Fillmore released “Documents Relative to the Empire of Japan,” Congress bestirred itself and called for an investigation. Japanese officials had held the whalemen in protective custody, and they had been released to U.S. officials unharmed, but some facts galled the civilized American senators.