Tue, Aug 12, 2003 page5

• Wake of Perry's ships still causing ripples

  HISTORY While Japanese mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the US, many Americans believe nothing happened between the two countries until Pearl Harbor

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  Walking behind a mock "black ship," the American playing the part of Commodore Matthew C. Perry held up an ominous-looking document and brandished it at parade spectators here on a recent Sunday. Dressed in a black period uniform, a sword at his hip, he glared from below his big hat.

  "Perry-san!" a woman chirped from the crowd. "Why do you look so serious?"

  The reception was hardly lighthearted when the real Commodore Perry arrived off this port city on Tokyo Bay on July 8, 1853, and forced Japan to open up to international trade and relations. The shock quickly led to the collapse of a regime that had ruled feudal Japan in isolation and peace for more than two centuries, and then to modern Japan's scramble to catch up with the West and grab an Asian empire.

  As events this summer commemorating the 150th anniversary of Perry's arrival have made clear, he and his black ships still have a profound resonance. Even more than General Douglas MacArthur, who led the American occupation of Japan after World War II, Perry is perhaps the most widely known foreign historic figure in Japan -- which might come as a surprise in the US.

  "Perry? He was an explorer, wasn't he? That's all I know," said Leslie Fields, 41, a software engineer from San Diego, who works at the American naval base about 15km south of Yokohama. "I have no idea what this parade is about."

  Americans might also be surprised by the lack of emphasis here on the Pearl Harbor attack. Recent editorials here hardly mentioned it in a review of the major events of the last 150 years. One of the most widely used government-endorsed junior high school textbooks devotes three pages to Perry, but only three lines to Pearl Harbor.

  If for the Japanese, relations with the US began with Perry, for Americans, they began with Pearl Harbor, said Kenichi Matsumoto, a professor of the history of Japanese thought at Reitaku University in nearby Tokyo.

  "For the United States, Pearl Harbor was a traumatic experience, but the Japanese don't fully understand its significance," he said. "On the other hand, Americans don't want to dwell on Perry's visit to Japan because it doesn't fit well with America's version of history. This gap in perception is very large."

  Pearl Harbor does not dovetail with Japan's emphasis on its own suffering in World War II. That focus makes it easier to underplay its aggressions against the US and other Asian nations.

  In the US, historians say, Perry has sunk into obscurity partly because he conjures up an imperial image that makes Americans uncomfortable. When Perry came here, America was in an expansionist mood, moved by the notion of Manifest Destiny to export Christianity, civilization and commerce.

  Historians agree, though, that President Millard Fillmore sent Perry to Japan largely because America needed oil -- though back then it was the oil from whales found off the Japanese coast. It was also competing against Britain for trade in China and needed Japan as a base. Perry arrived here with four ships mounting more than 60 guns and nearly 1,000 men, carrying a list of demands from Fillmore.

  The Japanese were overwhelmed by Perry's firepower. When he returned the next year, the Japanese yielded and signed a so-called treaty of amity and commerce. This thrust Japan -- which until then had banned travel abroad on punishment of death -- onto the world stage.

  To this day, the difference in perspectives on the beginning of American-Japanese relations colors each society's understanding of the other, historians say. The perceptions remain in what Shu Kishida, a professor at Wako University in Tokyo who specializes in applying psychoanalysis to history, calls "a people's subconscious memory."

  To Americans, Japan is the sneaky country behind Pearl Harbor, an image that re-emerged during trade friction in the 1980s. To Japan, the US is an insensitive brute.

  "Japan was saying, `No,'" Kishida said of Perry's demands, "but was forced to open up its ports, like a woman who was raped." That impression has lingered, he added.

  But most Japanese regard Perry's arrival as the basis of present friendly ties with the US, said Hiroshi Sato, 45, who teaches history at Tsukuda Junior High School in Tokyo. In his class, he dedicates three to four hours to Perry's visit.

  "When I read once that Perry wasn't well known in the US, I was a little surprised," he said.

  So were his students.

  "If Japanese students know about Perry, I figured that American students would know about him, too," said Miki Nishida, 14. "There were many events before Pearl Harbor."

  Two young Americans from New York who are stationed at the naval base here but had never heard of Perry -- Kelvin Garcia, 18, from the South Bronx, and D.J. Williams, 19, from Hillside, Queens -- were watching the parade here.

  "I don't know who he is," Garcia said. "It's a nice parade, though. Pearl Harbor? That was the first time the United States was attacked. A whole fleet was destroyed, and that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

  Bands marched by, one playing the theme song to The Flintstones. The actor playing Perry -- Rolan Logan, an operations specialist first class at the base here -- held the "Amity Document."

  "Americans sometimes tend to come in thinking we're the best thing on earth," he said, "but we need to understand Japanese culture, or other foreign cultures, better."

  Logan, who said he had known very little about Perry when he was assigned here 10 years ago, added, "I tend to think a country teaches history to give people a certain attitude."
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Napoli’s title hopes shaken by late Genoa equalizer

  • 2

    Privately owned city in Kenya taking on corrupt officials

  • 3

    MOE to encourage foreigners to work in Taiwan

  • 4

    Kane tastes first title as Bayern bid farewell to Mueller

  • 5

    Taiwan celebrates V-E Day for first time