Dr Chris Harding

Smells like weakness.

It does.

And so Japan, what happens really is in the course of the next few years, really from 1853 into the early 1860s, Japan steadily moves into more and more chaos with especially younger samurai who think that not only are the shogunate getting things wrong, but also that their own senior samurai in their own domains are... Grandad.

Grandad is too old.

He doesn't want to have a fight.

He's got...

Nothing left in the tank.

Do you see what I mean?

So a lot of these samurai will leave their domains, go to Kyoto, and some of them, especially in the west of Japan, what they want to do is take hold of the emperor as a kind of figurehead.

The emperor, by the time we get to the mid-1860s, he's only a teenager.

We'll get him as our man, as our figurehead, and we will launch a war against the Topogawa as the only way of properly responding to the foreigners.

And it's amazing that the legitimacy of the emperor is so strong that you can do that, even when he's clearly just your puppet.

But it works.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History.

We'll be back after this break.

I think the other thing that happens in that period, which makes it even more chaotic for the Japanese is, of course, Matthew C. Perry has come back, 1854.

The Japanese have to pretty much give him what he wants.

I think the logic is actually quite sound.

They say, you know, either we can...

We can be proud about this.