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Paper short abstract

This paper rethinks Japan's "unequal treaties" in the context of Tokugawa-Dutch relations. It argues that they aimed to dismantle an earlier unequal and humiliating relationship and to establish legally defined, reciprocal state relations.

Paper long abstract

This paper rethinks Japan's so-called "unequal treaties" of the late Tokugawa period by situating them in the longer context of Tokugawa-Dutch relations. Conventional narratives portray these treaties primarily as instruments of Western domination imposed on Japan. This paper instead argues that their original purpose was to clear away an earlier relationship that had long been regarded in Western eyes as unequal, humiliating, and legally insecure.

For more than two centuries, the Dutch had been confined to the small artificial island of Desima in Nagasaki and subjected to restrictive and often degrading regulations. From the Western perspective, this exclusive and asymmetrical arrangement came to be seen as incompatible with emerging norms of international law and sovereign equality. When Western powers sought to establish treaty relations with Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, their primary concern was therefore not to impose domination but to replace this earlier Tokugawa-Dutch relationship with a legally defined, reciprocal framework governing diplomacy and trade.

The paper examines how this objective shaped the negotiations conducted by Matthew Perry and Townsend Harris, as well as the abortive attempt by the Dutch commissioner Jan Donker Curtius to create a treaty "model" in 1856-57 for Japan's future treaty relations. It then analyzes the original draft of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce, which emphasized reciprocal jurisdiction, mutual most-favored-nation treatment, and freedom of residence and trade, and notably did not include a tariff schedule.

By comparing this draft with the final treaty text, the paper shows that the features later condemned as the hallmarks of the "unequal treaties" emerged not as the primary goals of Western negotiators but as contingent outcomes shaped in part by Japanese requests and negotiating strategies. The paper concludes that, from a contemporaneous perspective, these treaties were conceived less as instruments of subjugation than as mechanisms to normalize Japan's external relations by dismantling the earlier, highly asymmetrical Tokugawa-Dutch order.