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Hardcover Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853 Book

ISBN: 0060884320

ISBN13: 9780060884321

Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853

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Format: Mass Market Paperback

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Book Overview

On July 14, 1853, the four warships of America's East Asia Squadron made for Kurihama, 30 miles south of the Japanese capital, then called Edo. It had come to pry open Japan after her two and a half centuries of isolation and nearly a decade of intense planning by Matthew Perry, the squadron commander. The spoils of the recent Mexican SpanishAmerican War had whetted a powerful American appetite for using her soaring wealth and power for commercial...

Customer Reviews

200 customer ratings | 36 reviews

Rated 5 stars
Essential Reading

On one level this remarkable book will provide invaluable background for anyone interested in understanding why Japan's love-hate relationship with the United States continues to this day. It should also serve to underline the dangers of imposing one nation's views on another. But the book will also appeal to readers simply interested in a rich historical tour of Japan at the dawn of its modern era. The skillful weaving of...

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Rated 5 stars
A revelation about our use of power

This challenging and deeply researched book on Perry's "opening up" of Japan has the most painful relevance possible to our current government's colossal misadventure in allegedly trying to bring "Freedom and Democracy" to a land of darker-skinned people about whose history we are -- not willfully mis- informed, which would be bad enough, but wildly, tragically ignorant. And what kind of reverberations can we expect, decades...

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Rated 5 stars
Liberated or Oppressed?

Early on in his excellent history of Commodore Perry's deliberate and U.S. sanctioned effort to spread the gospel according to American interests in mid-19th century Japan, George Feifer has this to say: "Like the overwhelming majority of his fellows, the Commodore had a penchant for criticizing other societies while remaining silent about the flaws of his own. The notion of a Japanese squadron sailing into the Chesapeake...

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Rated 5 stars
"Breaking Open Japan" Opens the Much Wider Subject of Japan itself

In 1853, in one of America's earliest demonstrations of its willingness to flex its muscles internationally, President Fillmore sent Perry to Japan to open an exotic ancient country to diplomacy and trade. Less than 90 years later, the Japanese invaded us. Obviously, between these two momentous happenings, there there were thousands of other intervening events which contributed to the forming of Japanese-American relations...

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Rated 5 stars
A gripping, masterful telling

Commodore Perry's opening of Japan is an event that has faded somewhat in U.S. history, coming as it did in the years before the Civil War and well before the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor. But Feifer's scholarly, yet entertaining telling of the events deserves the attention of anyone who enjoys a good historical yarn or who seeks a better understanding of U.S. history in general. Feifer's Breaking Open Japan is both...

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