The ship left Yokohama harbor on January 11, 1867, and aboard it stood a thirteen-year-old boy dressed to represent an empire that was quietly running out of time.

Tokugawa Akitake — the 18th son of the legendary lord Tokugawa Nariaki, and younger half-brother of Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu — had been appointed Japan's special emissary to the Paris Exposition Universelle (Pari Banpaku). He was not yet fourteen. He had been designated for the role in late 1866, still thirteen, because the shogunate needed a face that carried the Tokugawa name. His age, under the circumstances, seems almost beside the point.

The mission carried a carefully assembled vision of Japan — lacquerware, swords, porcelain, silk — and the implicit message the Tokugawa shogunate was desperately broadcasting to Europe: we are sophisticated, we are stable, we are open for business. It was a performance of confidence the shogunate no longer entirely possessed.

Akitake arrived in Paris in March 1867 to a Europe drunk on novelty. He met Napoleon III at court. He shook hands with William III of the Netherlands, Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and Queen Victoria. The Exposition drew millions; Japan's pavilion attracted particular fascination among Parisian crowds who had been consuming ジャポニスム (Japonisumu) — the European craze for Japanese aesthetics — for years. Here, at last, were real Japanese objects, and a real Japanese delegation, and a real Japanese boy standing in the middle of it, being photographed in European clothes.

The irony was almost unbearable in retrospect. While Akitake was charming Napoleon's court, Japan's political structure was imploding. In November 1867, less than a year after Akitake's ship left Yokohama, Shogun Yoshinobu submitted the 大政奉還 (taisei hokan) — the formal return of governing authority to the Emperor. The 265-year-old Tokugawa shogunate dissolved itself on paper. Then, in January 1868, the 戊辰戦争 (Boshin Sensō) broke out between Tokugawa loyalists and imperial forces. Yoshinobu, perhaps in genuine concern for his brother's safety, or perhaps simply because there was no faction left that needed Akitake back, ordered him to remain in France.

So Akitake waited. He studied in Paris. He visited museums. He received dispatches describing the dismantling of the world that had created him. The new Meiji government eventually authorized his return in August 1868. He arrived back in Yokohama in December 1868 and was named the 11th head — and, as it turned out, the final 大名 (daimyo) — of Mito Domain. Three years later, in 1871, the Meiji government abolished the domains entirely. He became a private citizen. He lived quietly until 1910, outlasting the entire Meiji era, a relic of a dynasty that the world had photographed and then forgotten.

His shadow on that trip, however, cast an enormously different shape. Shibusawa Eiichi, the peasant's son who served as the delegation's accountant and secretary, stood in the Crystal Palace in Paris and underwent a transformation. He had arrived in France as an aide to a teenager; he left as a man convinced that industrial capitalism — not samurai rebellion, which he had been plotting just years before — was the mechanism Japan needed to survive. He returned to Japan and spent the next four decades as the architect of Japanese industry: banks, railways, cotton mills, insurance companies. He founded over five hundred enterprises. Today his face is on the 10,000-yen note.

The thirteen-year-old who was sent to project samurai power came home to a Japan that no longer had samurai. The commoner accountant who watched from behind his shoulder became one of the most consequential Japanese figures of the modern era. History distributed its ironies with characteristic indifference.