Paper short abstract:

The Iwakura Embassy’s efforts to broach the issue of treaty revision have generally received quite negative appraisals. Yet this paper shows that in one crucial aspect - access to the interior - the experience gained during their global odyssey had an immediate impact on their return to Japan.

Paper long abstract:

While the Iwakura Embassy’s attempts to broach the question of treaty revision have generally received quite negative appraisals, this paper shows that in one crucial aspect - access to the interior - the experience gained during their global odyssey had an immediate impact on their return to Japan. The party arrived back in 1873 to find the foreign community lobbying for more access to the hinterland beyond the Treaty Limits, including the right to trade. Incremental developments during the mission's absence even gave the impression that this was just a matter of time. The caretaker government had allowed foreign visitors to the Kyoto Exhibition in 1872, a passenger coach service was now running from Yokohama to Odawara, and some Italian silk merchants had received permission to venture inland, a precedent seized upon by foreign diplomats to demand commercial access for all. They also pointed to the more than 600 foreign oyatoi employees now working there in the service of the Japanese authorities as evidence that it was unsustainable and unfair to deny similar access to residents of the treaty ports as well.

In response to such encroachment it was the round of negotiations led by Terashima Munenori on the Iwakura Embassy's return that finally ruled out the prospect of unfettered access to the interior, and for trade in particular, for as long extraterritorial jurisdiction remained in place. The rationale for this stance drew on a range of recently acquired knowledge drawing comparisons with Turkey, Egypt and China, and citing reports by Sir Rutherford Alcock, the former British Minister to China, on his recent attempts to revise the Treaty of Tianjin. The outcome was a controlled system of passports granting access for the purpose only of health or science, but not trade, an arrangement that held until extraterritoriality was finally abolished in 1899. It served as a salutary warning to both foreign merchants and diplomats that treaty revision in Japan's case was not simply a matter of obtaining further concessions for future commercial expansion, but would ultimately involve a trade-off restoring sovereign rights as well.