Word: shimoda
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...were-there fashion, the scrolls faithfully capture the Americans in every conceivable pursuit: tippling, hunting, surveying Shimoda harbor, laundering their clothes at the beach. They also suggest that U.S. sailors have not changed very much. One picture depicts a tipsy seaman dallying in an inn with five tarts, and the dialogue is suitably arch: "Oh, come a little closer to me!" "I say, I say, it seems you've had too much and can't stand up!" Japanese casualness about sex convinced Perry that they were "a lewd people." When the shogun's commissioners complained that...
...assigned as paramour to 50-year-old Townsend Harris, first U.S. consul to Japan. Indeed, Harris, a white-thatched descendant of Roger Williams, threatened to break off trade treaty negotiations with Japanese officialdom until the girl was installed in his living quarters near the seacoast town of Shimoda. Long before she caught the consul's roving eye, Okichi was renowned for her beauty, her regal bearing and her torch songs. Her true love was her childhood sweetheart, a peasant carpenter named Tsuru-Matsu. but after Townsend Harris' ultimatum. Japanese officials lured Tsuru-Matsu away from Okichi with promises...
...Nowadays Shimoda stages an annual "Carnival of the Black Ships" celebrating the U.S. opening of Japan to the West, and an actress assumes the honored role of Okichi. But, says Author Yamata, U.S. ambassadors do not stay to acknowledge that portion of the ceremony...
Commodore Perry got his foot in, but it was Townsend Harris who opened the door of Japan wide enough to let the traders in. Who Townsend Harris was, few U. S. citizens know. But he is a hero in Japan; his two residences-the consulate at Shimoda and the legation at Tokyo are preserved as shrines. The first U. S. Consul General to Japan, Townsend Harris in 1858 negotiated the first effective commercial treaty between the U. S. and Japan-a feat which historians have ranked with the world's leading diplomatic successes...
...himself. The Japanese distinctly did not want him around, Commodore Perry notwithstanding. They asked him to go home on the ship he came on. When he refused, they set a cheeky guard around his miserable house, prohibited his traveling more than seven miles from the dismal fishing village of Shimoda, gave him diseased chickens to eat, picked on his Chinese servants while refusing to let Japanese work for him, evaded, stalled, levied a staggering rate of exchange. Their diplomatic technique was to say yes and do nothing. Harris' technique was stubbornness, honesty, hospitality. It was four years before...