American warship, woodblock print ca. 1854 (Nagasaki Prefecture)

Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1976 musical, Pacific Overtures, makes waves by sailing back in time to explore the 19th-century birth of Japanese and American relations.

by Leonard Jacobs

There are many reasons for the dramatic allure of Pacific Overtures, from Stephen Sondheim’s evocative score to a book by John Weidman that features episodic storytelling rather than a completely linear narrative. But for many, the salient reason for the musical’s fascination is its foundation in a real historical event: the 1853-54 opening of Japan to the West by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, acting at the behest of U.S. President Millard Fillmore.

Today the event is almost impossible to imagine. Think of it this way: If America, in 2004, sent two aircraft carriers and two battleships to a distant land which, for internal reasons, had enjoyed self-imposed isolation for 250 years, the world would likely watch the event on cable news, complete with 24-hour coverage and running commentary. The world of 1853, obviously, offered no such media immediacy to Americans. Instead, Perry’s arrival in the harbor of Uraga, near Edo—four massive coal-burning ships emitting ominous plumes of smoke—was a watershed, culture-changing event for the Japanese. Whether for their color or for the color of their smoke, these vessels became known as the "black ships."

"Portrait of Perry, a North American," woodblock print, ca. 1854 (Nagasaki Prefecture)

The genesis for Perry’s trip occurred a year earlier, in 1852. Perry—a Mexican War hero and confidant of Fillmore, a Whig who entered the Oval Office after the sudden death of President Taylor—warned that the British, now in control of Singapore and Hong Kong, were positioned to take the upper hand in commercial trade. To protect and buttress the fast-growing, industrializing American economy, Perry reasoned, the U.S. ought to open "ports of refuge" in Japan, a country that had barricaded itself from the globe since 1639. Fillmore agreed, and sent Perry across the Pacific, armed with a letter addressed to the Emperor Meiji.

"I have particularly charged Commodore Perry to abstain from every act which could possibly disturb the tranquility of your imperial majesty’s dominions," Fillmore wrote, mustering diplomatic vernacular with ease. But then he got to the point, noting how American "steamships can go from California to Japan in 18 days," how California, which entered the union in 1850, "produces about 60 millions of dollars in gold every year…," and how Japan, most of all, "is also a rich and fertile country, and produces many very valuable articles." For these reasons, he wrote, there ought to be trade, "for the benefit both of Japan and the United States."

It was reasoning thickly ladled on: "We know that the ancient laws of your imperial majesty’s government do not allow of foreign trade, except with the Chinese and the Dutch," wrote Fillmore. "But as the state of the world changes and new governments are formed, it seems to be wise, from time to time, to make new laws." Plus, it was ladled at the mouth of a gun, for Perry, when he steamed into Uraga harbor on July 8, 1853, had under his command two frigates, the Mississippi and the Susquehanna, towing two sloops; between them, there were 65 guns and nearly 1,000 men. If Fillmore’s letter, however diplomatic, did not get the message across, cannon fire surely would.

War Ships of State

Commodore Perry’s dictated thoughts about the journey can be read, in somewhat excruciating detail, in an 1856 work by Francis L. Hawks: "Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, performed in the years 1852, 1853, and 1854, under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, by Order of the Government of the United States." The Japanese perspective, however, did not produce such hubristic titles. Whereas one painting of Perry’s ships, painted by an American, has the words "U.S. JAPAN FLEET. Com. PERRY carrying the 'GOSPEL of GOD' to the HEATHEN, 1853" right on the front of it, Japanese representations are fewer and more emotional, angry depictions of fright.

Commodore Matthew C. Perry. Daguerreotype by Matthew Brady (detail) ca.1856 (Library of Congress)

The Japanese were at first terrified by Perry’s ships because they looked nothing like the vessels they had known for nearly a quarter-millennium. The 1639 introduction of sakoku, or "closed country," required "severe restrictions on shipbuilding," as MIT Professors John W. Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, authors of the course Black Ships and Samurai have noted, as well as maritime activity "restricted to sailing small vessels in coastal waters." Because Japan’s "modest vessels obviously could not compare with the great multi-mast ships" that America had sent across the seas, it made it "all the more painfully apparently how far behind Japan had fallen during its long seclusion."

Nor was the enforced isolation of sakoku easy to maintain. Shipwrecked sailors and fisherman trolling too close to Japan were routinely captured, jailed, and subjected to abuse. The Japanese themselves were forbidden to travel abroad. Only through a tiny Dutch mission, Dejima, did Japan keep an eye, albeit a distant one, upon the world.

Worse yet, when Perry returned in 1854, his fleet had more than doubled, to nine ships. So it isn’t surprising that local artists were given the freedom, perhaps even encouraged, to depict Perry and especially his vessels, according to Dower and Miyagawa, "as Darkness Incarnate." Indeed, the images possess a distinctly apocalyptic scope: "the ship’s hull is pitch black, smoke belches from its funnel, the figurehead on the bow is a leering monster, portholes high in the stern glower like the eyes of an apparition, the ship’s sides bristle with rows of cannon, and gunfire streaks like a searchlight from a gun near the bow, as well as from another, unseen, at the stern."

Putting It Together

Harold Prince’s original Broadway production of Pacific Overtures (1976) seemed to acknowledge what a challenge it would be to dramatize the moment when the "black ships" arrived. After all, the audience must not only understand how vital this event was to the evolution of modern Japan, but the premise for the piece itself fairly rides on it.

"U.S. JAPAN FLEET. Com. PERRY carrying the 'GOSPEL of GOD' to the HEATHEN, 1853" by James G. Evans, oil on canvas (Chicago Historical Society)

He found it, as Joanne Gordon observes in The Theatre of Stephen Sondheim, by deploying "a stylized, theatrical spectacle" featuring "a massive sailing vessel" that "unfolded, accordion-like, toward the audience." Atop it, naturally, stood Commodore Perry himself, dolled up like a "terrifying Kabuki lion, with floating white mane and exaggeratedly fierce makeup" and communicating, to hilarious effect, "through the leonine roar of the trombone."

Roundabout’s production of Pacific Overtures, the first Broadway revival since its debut, will prove interesting for several reasons. Director Amon Miyamoto (more) has already tackled the piece, most recently in an all-Japanese version that appeared in the Lincoln Center Festival in 2002 with Japanese text and which eschewed Prince’s faux-Kabuki approach in favor of what the New York Times called "Noh-style minimalism." Miyamoto’s revival for Roundabout, however, is in English with an all Asian-American cast.

Then there is the approach taken by the piece itself, particularly in the spare but highly deliberate lyric choices made by Stephen Sondheim. The scene arrives early on. The audience, having met John Manjiro, a fisherman who warns of Perry’s impending arrival, and Kayama Yesaemon, a minor samurai charged by the Shogun with repelling the ships when they appear, hears a bell abruptly, loudly clang. Our focus quickly shifts to another fisherman and a local thief. In song, Sondheim offers us, unrhymed, first the perspective of the individual, deftly giving us a sense of what the vision of those mighty "black ships" might have been. Then he moves on, equally deftly, to endow us with at least a sense of what Perry’s arrival ultimately meant for Japan as a whole. This is how the Fisherman begins his narrative:

I was standing on the beach
Near the cliffs
At Oshama.
I was spreading out the nets
For the morning sun.
It was early in July
And the day was getting hot,
And I stopped to wipe my eyes,
And by accident I turned
And looked out to sea...

Next, the thief who had been "rifling through the house/Of some priests/In Uraga," began to see Perry’s high-mast monsters reaching the horizon, too. In a superb display of hyperbole, Sondheim gives both men—and later, some townsfolk—phrases that heighten the Armageddon-like feel of the moment: The ships aren’t sailing breezily along, but "Boiling through the mist" and "Roaring through the sea." Finally, the Reciter, who acts as narrator for much of Pacific Overtures, adds some words of his own, likening the general panic to the "screaming" of gulls. At last, our focus again returns to the fisherman and the thief who sum up the arrival of the "black ships"—the end of over two centuries of Japanese isolation—this way:

And I thought it was the end
Of the world!
To which the Reciter replies, "And it was."

Overture or Epilogue?

Was it the end or was it the beginning? The Japanese might have thought the former, but Sondheim and Weidman make us ponder the question. For while Pacific Overtures could have ended with Perry’s arrival and glossed over Japan’s global reemergence, they peg the aftermath of America’s gunboat diplomacy in story and song instead.

Kayama, the minor samurai, is too politically low-rung to receive the Americans who sit, steaming, in the harbor. He persuades his betters that Manjiro, the fisherman, should act as a lord, but Perry, clutching Fillmore’s letter, demurs. A shogun might suffice, and in "Chrysanthemum Tea," the Shogun’s politically astute mother gives him the brew ("an herb that’s superb for disturbances at sea") and sings:

When I gave consideration
To this letter they convey,
I decided if there weren’t
Any Shogun to receive it,
It would act as a deterrent
Since they’d have no place to leave it,
And they might go away
My Lord.

Yet the Americans don’t go away—the unwanted, unwashed, and unwished for aren’t going anywhere. We witness the Japanese vainly struggle to salvage their traditions. A Kanagawa treaty house floor is mat-covered so Americans won’t touch the soil. In "Someone in a True," three Japanese relate their version of how their countrymen capitulated. In "Please, Hello!," European powers compete voraciously for their fair share of trade. Western sailors mistake Manjiro’s mentor’s daughter for a whore, cooing "Pretty Lady," but she’s not a whore at all.

Perry’s "black ships," in the end, seem to hang in the air, a toxic haze of moral unease. Did America, via Perry, ruin Japan? The authors are smart to avoid easy answers. Smarter still, is a Sondheim lyric that neatly encapsulates it all:

One must accommodate the times
As one lives them.
One must remember that.

Leonard Jacobs is an associate editor at Back Stage.

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