Dr Chris Harding

I've got many more like that back in the United States.

So there really is only one answer that you can possibly give us.

And there's this lovely image, you know, Japan at this point, woodblock printing is a really big thing.

Lovely image by a Japanese artist, we think in Nagasaki, shows one of these ships.

with the black hull spewing this evil-looking black smoke from the top.

And both the prow and the stern are given faces, these kind of malevolent, demonic faces.

This sense that what Japan is now facing is a turning point, unwanted, and that Japan may be potentially in an awful lot of trouble now.

Terrifying.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And funnily enough, some of the samurai who come out, they're sent out in a rush to go and greet Commodore Matthew C. Perry.

Firearms they're holding would be in a museum back in the US or Europe.

Probably most of them didn't have bullets in them.

A lot of the samurai might not even know really what to do with them.

So the fact that you're facing steamship technology, these incredibly powerful guns on these ships with virtually nothing, to their credit, the Japanese work out very, very quickly, I think, the depth of...

of the trouble that they're in and their response, which we talk about in a moment, I think is motivated by the shock of that technological gap.

They're not naive about it.

They see it immediately.

So I think at the beginning, things look pretty bad for Japan, you know, with that mix of internal and external.

The internal part of this, I suppose, there are a couple of things going on in Japan which inform how they respond to the Americans.