In the previous article, we talked about the beginning of the Black Ship Incident as a whole, and this one we will focus on the background of the story of the Black Ship Incident.
Since the signing of a peace agreement between the United States and Mexico on February 2, 1848, in Guadalupe Hidalgo, a small town near Mexico City, the United States has acquired most of the western part of North America, which originally belonged to Mexico, becoming a country bordering the Pacific Ocean, and the eastern coast of the Pacific Ocean is East Asia, which has facilitated the Invasion of Asian countries, especially East Asia dominated by China. In 1844, in order to obtain the same terms of trade with China as Britain, the United States forced the Then Qing government to sign the Sino-US Treaty of Wangxia. During this period, Japan, which belonged to the same East Asian cultural circle as China, was long under the influence of China, which was separated from the water for a long time, and Japan under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate also implemented a policy of locking up the country, so that the Japanese domestic market was not developed, which led to the United States also full of expectations for Japan that did not sign a contract, which later became the US Navy Commodore Matthew. Perry and Zu. Abbott and others led the fleet into the Uraga Sea in Edo Bay, Japan, and opened the gateway to Japan and laid the groundwork.
From the first "Lockdown Order" issued by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1633 to the 220 years after Perry's voyage in 1853, Japan was in the "Lockdown Era". During this period, with the consolidation of the shogunate system, the Tokugawa shogunate's foreign trade policy changed, and the "policy of closing the country" gradually formed. In order to prohibit the spread of Christianity in Japan, the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada issued a ban in 1616, stipulating that the trading ships of Portugal, Britain and other countries could only be traded in Nagasaki and Pinghu. After Tokugawa Iemitsu took over the government, he further strengthened his father Tokugawa Hidetada's foreign policy and issued the "Lockdown Order" five times. The Tokugawa shogunate lasted for decades, and finally formed the "policy of locking the country" by issuing a series of Bongshu and Jueshu. The introduction of the "lockdown policy" was to a certain extent conducive to maintaining the early rule of the shogunate, but at the end of the shogunate's rule, the "lockdown policy" made Japan close and listen, missed the wave of development of the industrial revolution, hindered Japan's national development and social progress, so that it was far behind the world's major capitalist countries, and the weakening of national strength made Japan unable to cope with the invasion of the US fleet, objectively promoting the occurrence of the "black ship incident".