Aboard the Powhatan, Japan opens its ports to American trade

Four years after Commodore Perry's warships forced Japan to open a single coaling port, the Tokugawa shogunate faced a harder choice: sign a full commercial treaty with the Americans, or risk the fate China had just suffered at the hands of British and French gunboats. On July 29, 1858, Townsend Harris met shogunate officials on the deck of the USS Powhatan in Edo Bay and signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, opening four new ports to U.S. trade in addition to the two already opened under the earlier Convention of Kanagawa and placing American citizens outside Japanese law. Britain, Russia, France, and the Netherlands signed near-identical treaties within months…