Dr Chris Harding

And by the 1860s, so within a few years, a lot of the big players around the world have these deals.

They become trade deals.

They become highly unequal trade deals.

You have lots of foreigners starting to live in Japan, places like Yokohama, now a big city, go from being nothing to a kind of thriving treaty port, they call them, where foreigners are allowed to be there.

It's really worrying.

I think worrying for a couple of reasons.

One is because trade is really unequal.

Also, if you commit a crime, if you beat someone up or, God forbid, even murder them as an American or as a French person in some way, you'll be tried according to your laws by your own people.

And that seems like double standards.

Two-tier justice, a phrase of the moment.

That makes Japanese people really angry.

There's a lovely woodblock print of this period which shows a sumo wrestler.

throwing this overdressed foreigner, overdressed European, over his knee and onto the ground.

This is how people feel.

And you get the slogan, revere the emperor, expel the barbarian.

So a current of thought starts to build, particularly with his younger samurai, saying,

what we want to do is have the emperor back in power.

The shogunate have clearly failed on their brief.

They need to be overthrown, got rid of entirely.

And with the emperor as our figurehead, we will modernise, we will stand up to the Europeans and the Americans and others.