Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860)

The Japanese Embassy to the United States (万延元年遣米使節, Man'en gannen kenbei shisetsu^?, lit. First year of the Man'en era mission to America) was dispatched in 1860 by the Tokugawa shogunate (bakufu). Its objective was to ratify the new Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation between the United States and Japan, in addition to being Japan’s first diplomatic mission to the United States since the 1854 opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry.

Another significant facet of the mission was the bakufu’s dispatch of a Japanese warship, the Kanrin Maru, to accompany the delegation across the Pacific and thereby demonstrate the degree to which Japan had mastered Western navigation techniques and ship technologies barely six years after ending its isolation policy of nearly 250 years.

On January 19, 1860, the Kanrin Maru set sail from Uraga for San Francisco under the leadership of Captain Katsu Kaishū, with Nakahama "John" Manjiro as the official translator, carrying 96 Japanese men and an American officer, John M. Brooke on board. The overall head of the mission was Admiral Kimura Yoshitake (木村喜毅), a high ranking Shogunate official. Fukuzawa Yukichi, the future educator and reformer, but then only a young man eager to see foreign lands, had volunteered his services as an assistant to Admiral Kimura.

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