The man of commerce asks to be told of its products and its trade,
its skill in manufactures, the commodities it needs, and the returns it can
supply.
The ethnologist is curious to pry into the physical appearance of its
inhabitants; to dig, if possible, from its language the fossil remains of long
buried history; and in the affiliation of its people to supply, perchance, a
gap in the story of man’s early wanderings over the globe.
The scholar asks to be introduced to its literature that he may contemplate
in historians, poets, and dramatists, (for Japan has them all,) a picture
of the national mind.
The Christian desires to know the varied phases of their superstition and
idolatry; and longs for the dawn of that day when a purer faith and more
enlightened worship shall bring them within the circle of Christendom.
Amid such a diversity of pursuits as we have enumerated, a common
interest unites all in a common sympathy; and hence, the divine and the
philosopher, the navigator and the naturalist, the man of business and the
man of letters, have alike joined in a desire for the thorough exploration of
a field at once so extensive and so inviting.
With so much to allure, it is not at all wonderful that the attempt to
explore should have been repeatedly made. Scarce a maritime nation in the
civilized world has been wanting in effort. The Portuguese, Spaniards,
Dutch, English, French, and Russians, have each in turn, sought to establish
commercial relations with Japan. The Portuguese and English have both
so far succeeded, that, but for themselves, they might permanently have retained
their positions. The first were expelled; the latter voluntarily abandoned
the field. The Dutch alone, of all Christian nations, were allowed to
remain for purposes of traffic, and they purchased the privilege at the price
of national humiliation and personal imprisonment, for which all the profits
of gainful barter offer but an inadequate compensation.
Limited, however, as have been their sources of information, it is to the
Dutch chiefly that the world, until within a very recent period, has been indebted
for the knowledge it has had of the Japanese. Nor is that knowledge
quite as circumscribed as has sometimes been supposed. Ksempfer,
Thunberg, Titsingh, Doeff, Fischer, Meylan, Siebold, and others, have certainly
told us something about Japan. But they could not tell us all it is
desirable to know. All were connected with the factory at Dezima, and
were watched, of course, with suspicious jealousy. Their only opportunities
for seeing anything beyond the town of Nagasaki were afforded at their
periodical visits to the court; and Ksempfer, the first in the list, has so fully
related all that an European could learn from this source, that very little
has been added to our stock of knowledge by his successors, with the single
exception of Siebold. He has collected new facts and materials, and the
result of his observations and researches has been given to the world in his
“ N i p p o n , Archiv sur Beschreibung von J a p a n” (N i p p o n , an Archive
toward the Description of Japan.) While, therefore, it is not quite correct
to say that the civilized world knows nothing of Japan, it may truly be
asserted that what is known is very much less than what is unknown.
Notwithstanding, however, the national efforts at exploration to which
we have alluded, it was reserved for our own, the youngest of the nations, to
break down at last the barriers with which this singular people had surrounded
themselves; and to be the first, in modern times, to establish with
them a treaty of friendship and trade which (already copied as far as was
possible by other governments) is to form, as we hope, the initiatory step in
the introduction of Japan into the circle of commercial nations.
May we not be permitted here to add that it seems not altogether inappropriate
that the United States should be the instrument of breaking down
these barriers, and of opening Japan to the rest of the world.
When, in 1295, Marco Polo returned to Venice from his long sojourn in
Asia, he spake to Europeans, among other marvels which shocked their
credulity, but which have since been fully verified, of the existence of a
large island off the coast of Cathay, (China,) which he called Zipangu.
That island is the modern Nippon of the Japanese Kingdom. He told, also,
the story of the indomitable courage of the people of Zipangu, and related
how they had successively resisted the armies of the powerful Kublai Khan,
the conquerors, at that day, of all Asia, and the terror of Europe. He laid
before them the maps which he had made and brought home, with an inscription
written upon the shore-line of the Yellow sea: u There is a great island
to the east.” Years rolled on; Marco Polo’s written story and maps had
found their way to Genoa, and probably had been forgotten. At length, in
the sixteenth century, they fell into the hands of a man who did not cast
them idly by; that man was Christopher Columbus, whose strong mind was
then travelling to the overruling conviction of his life that there must be, to
the westward of Europe, great bodies of land at that time utterly unknown.
I t was Marco Polo’s map, and his statements concerning Zipangu particularly,
which confirmed his conjectures; and when he sailed, it was Zipangu,
or, as the Italian manuscript of Marco Polo had it, Gipango, on which he
hoped and expected, to find the termination of his voyage. Accordingly,
(as we know,) when he landed on Cuba he believed that he had reached the
goal of his long cherished hopes. He knew not that a continent barred his
way between Europe and Zipangu; nor that still further westward, beyond
that continent a mighty ocean rolled its waters, which must be traversed
before Zipangu could be reached.
But though not destined himself to find and open Japan to Christendom,
it has so happened, in the order of Providence, that on the continent which
he discovered, and which barred his way to the land he sought, has grown
up a nation which has performed a part of his contemplated work, and ful