THE SUBJECT OF treaty revision was for so many years the hinge on which Japanese foreign policy turned, the working of the new treaties is still such a burning question to the foreign residents, that the new-comer desirous of peeping below the surface and learning something of the inner springs of local politics, will perhaps find an interest in details that might otherwise be condemned as ‘ancient history’ In effect, is not the recent past our only trustworthy guide to the present and the near future?

Japan's first treaty with the United States was that wrung from her, in 1854, by the terror which Commodore Perry's ‘black ships’ had inspired. Others, dating from 1858 to 1869 inclusive, followed with Russia, Great Britain, France, and the rest of the European powers great and small, the chief features in these documents, which were practically merged in one by the insertion of the most favoured nation clause, being (I) the opening of the ports of Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Hakodate to foreign trade and residence, with a radius of 10 ri(about 24 1/2miles) round each, termed ‘Treaty Limits,’ wherein foreigners might travel without passports; (II) the establishment of ‘exterritoriality’, that is to say, the exemption of foreigners from the jurisdiction of the Japanese law-courts; (III) a very low scale of import dues, mostly five per cent ad valorem.

Such, in barest outline, were the old treaties, their tacitly assumed basis being the unequal status of the two contracting parties—civilised white men on the one hand, Japan but just emerging from Asiatic semi-barbarism on the other. How to get them revised on more favourable terms, long formed the great crux of Japanese diplomacy. The matter was a complicated one, involving, as it did on the foreigner's part, the surrender of commercial and legal privileges that had been enjoyed for a long term of years—involving, too, the extremely delicate question as to the fitness of Japan for admission into the family of Christian nations on equal terms. Legally, Japan had a claim to the revision of the treaties as far back as 1872; and the long tarrying of Prince Iwakura's embassy in the United States in 1872-3 was avowedly caused by the desire to conclude a new treaty then and there.