The first Japanese ambassadors to the United…
March 1860 CE
Dispatched by the Tokugawa shogunate (bakufu), the embassy's objective is 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 is 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 two hundred and fifty years years.