Expeditionary
Japan Expedition
The long American effort to open Japan to trade after more than two centuries of the closed-country policy.
It began with Commander Biddle's rebuffed visit to Yedo Bay in 1846, continued with Commander Glynn's 1849 mission to Nagasaki to recover stranded American sailors, and reached its climax in Commodore Matthew Perry's celebrated expedition of 1853–1854, which produced the Treaty of Kanagawa and broke Japan's isolation. Later operations supported the consul Townsend Harris and led to the broader commercial treaty of 1858. Marines served throughout as ships' guards and ceremonial escorts, their disciplined bearing a deliberate instrument of Perry's diplomacy; the senior Marine officer, Major Jacob Zeilin, would later become the seventh Commandant of the Corps. The expedition produced no combat casualties. Its one Marine death was Private Robert Williams, who died of disease in 1854 and is remembered as the first American serviceman buried on Japanese soil.
Engagements in this conflict (3)
Record no. 357