Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

4 • INTRODUCTION
This was also the era of “Manifest Destiny,” the widespread belief
among Caucasian Americans that they had a God-given right to continental
expansion from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. In January
1848, James Marshall was building a sawmill in Coloma in the then-
Mexican territory of California when he discovered gold. By the end of
the year, Marshall’s discovery launched the “Gold Rush,” arguably the
most significant historical event of the American West. The Gold Rush
transformed the West, especially California, into a mining, agricultural,
and industrial power attracting people and capital from all over the
world, including Asia.
By the time United States Navy Commodore Matthew Perry sailed
for Japan, the growing economic and social disparity between northern
and southern states, the increasingly divisive issue of slavery, territorial
expansion on the North American continent, and the transformation of
the American West by the Gold Rush were the primary features of national
life for most Americans. Although not a major world power by
1850, the expanding United States increasingly attracted the attention of
Europeans, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx. The country
was growing in population (primarily through immigration from Europe),
expanding its already vast territory, and developing its natural resources,
industries, and technologies.
In 1850, Japan was not an industrializing country. There were handcraft,
agricultural, and fishing industries in many parts of the country,
but not large-scale heavy industries requiring inanimate sources of energy,
such as steam power. Japan had an advanced artistic, architectural,
and philosophical culture for well over a thousand years, and an advanced
administrative system run by the Tokugawa shogun’s bakufu
government that kept relative peace for over 200 years. Japan was relatively
urbanized, with more than 20 percent of Japanese living in cities.
The major cities of Osaka, Kyoto, and especially Edo compared favorably
with Paris, Berlin, and New York of the same era.
Japan up to the 1850s is often described as “feudal” because of its
hereditary, Confucian-based hierarchical class system of samurai, farmers,
artisans, and merchants. The samurai—including domain leaders (the
daimyō), their retainers, and all officials of the Tokugawa shogunate government—were
Japan’s warrior class. Numbering less than 10 percent of
the population, the samurai were an unproductive class that lived off
stipends. They were the privileged and the powerful of Japan. They were