A Brief History of Japan

The Japanese archipelago has been inhabited since the Paleolithic Age, and by the 8th century CE it had become a powerful and unified state ruled by an emperor. At the end of the 12th century, a less centralized form of government emerged, with a warrior class of samurai, led by military commanders called the shogun, effectively governing the nation. In this era, Japan was a feudal society, with peasants working the land in return for protection by the samurai.

The office of the shogun was subject to competition and coups, and rather than being strictly hereditary, the shogunate passed through a variety of powerful families. Beginning in the 1630s, the shogunate led by the Tokugawa family enacted a series of foreign policy measures that effectively closed Japan’s borders, preventing immigration and emigration, strictly limiting foreign trade to a small number of designated locations, and prohibiting Christianity. This policy was known as sakoku, or “closed country,” and its effects on Japan were significant. On the one hand, the Tokugawa shogunate was able to concentrate on domestic issues and ushered in a 300-year era of peace; on the other, their foreign policy prolonged the existence of the feudal system and isolated the country from the industrial developments of the rest of the world.

The policy of sakoku ended only after intense pressure from the West, which was very keen to engage Japan in foreign trade. In 1853, the U.S. Navy, led by Commodore Matthew Perry, infiltrated Tokyo harbor with four warships. Under the implied threat of military action, Perry requested that Japan initiate relations with America. Faced with warships of a kind they had never seen, the Japanese had no alternative but to sign the Kanagawa Treaty, which immediately opened two ports to U.S. trade and ended the country’s centuries-long isolation.

In 1868, not long after the Kanagawa Treaty, the age of the shogunate also came to an end when a group of political reformers succeeded in re-establishing a central- ized, imperial government. This restoration of power to the emperor is known as the Meiji Restoration, named after Emperor Meiji, who ruled until 1912. During the 45 years of the Meiji era, Japan experienced rapid industrialization, vastly increasing its wealth and power, and successfully avoided falling under the expansionist aspirations of the Western powers. The fictional events of Madama Butterfly take place during the Meiji era, when Japan was only just adapting to the presence of foreigners and Christian missions, international trade, and the notion of emigration. All of these issues are at play in the opera.