The magistrate's face was bright red. His interpreters, who by this point had also been drinking, were teasing him about it — gently, in the way subordinates tease a superior they are fond of and a little drunk with. Through the windows of the great cabin aboard USS Powhatan, Edo Bay was visible, and in Edo Bay, six more American warships rode at anchor.

It was March 27, 1854, four days before the signing of the 神奈川条約 (Kanagawa Jōyaku), and Commodore Matthew Perry was hosting the shogunate's commissioners for dinner.

Perry had assembled his bar with care. The liquor selection reads like a tour of Western civilization's relationship with alcohol: grog, Scotch whisky, American bourbon, Dutch genever gin, Madeira, sherry, Champagne, maraschino cherry liqueur, and cherry cordial. The sweet liqueurs were a deliberate choice — Perry understood his guests had no experience with Western spirits, and brightly colored, intensely sweet drinks would prove irresistible to officials encountering them for the first time. He was right. Contemporary Japanese accounts describe at least one magistrate developing an immediate and audible appreciation for the liqueurs, drinking them with lip-smacking satisfaction while his interpreters, themselves warming to the atmosphere, observed that his face had already gone red.

The laughter in that cabin masked something that everyone present understood perfectly. The 徳川幕府 (Tokugawa Bakufu) had enforced 鎖国 (sakoku) — the isolation policy — for 220 years. The policy had not been passive neglect of foreign relations; it had been actively, sometimes violently maintained. Foreign ships were turned away. Japanese subjects who left and returned were executed. The Dutch were permitted a tiny trading post on the artificial island of 出島 (Dejima) in 長崎 (Nagasaki), strictly contained, strictly monitored, their every interaction with Japan controlled by shogunate officials. Christianity had been suppressed with torture and crucifixion. For two centuries, Japan had existed in deliberate, enforced invisibility.

Now its officials were aboard an American warship toasting the health of the President of the United States — not because they wanted to be there, but because through the portholes they could count six warships in Edo Bay, and the man sitting across from them commanded them all. USS Powhatan was a steam-powered side-wheel frigate, 253 feet long, bristling with guns. Refusing Perry's dinner invitation would have been a diplomatic insult with naval consequences. They came.

The lead negotiator was 林顕 (Hayashi Akira), known by his official title as 林大学頭 (Hayashi Daigaku-no-kami). He was not a warrior. He was a scholar — a specialist in Chinese Confucian classics, appointed to handle what he privately described as an impossible task: negotiate with a foreign power that could not be expelled, concede as little as possible, and somehow preserve the shogunate's dignity in the process. By some accounts, he wept during the final negotiations.

The banquet on March 27 was surrounded by cultural exchanges that have a quality of two worlds staring at each other across an unbridgeable gap. Perry's men staged a minstrel show for their Japanese guests — blackface entertainment that the shogunate officials processed as exotic American spectacle, something from the edge of a world they had been forbidden to know. The Japanese side hosted a return banquet featuring 酒 (sake), tea, and Madeira wine (probably obtained through Nagasaki's Dutch connection — even in isolation, some things had leaked through). Around 160 persons attended the combined ceremonies; the toasts were formal and bilingual: to the health of the Emperor of Japan and to the health of the President of the United States.

It was the first time in history that a Japanese official had formally toasted a foreign head of state aboard a foreign warship in Edo Bay. The first meal, as someone later observed, of the 開国 (kaikoku) era.

Four days later, the Convention of Kanagawa was signed. Two ports — 下田 (Shimoda) and 箱館 (Hakodate) — were opened to American ships. The 220-year isolation was officially over.

The consequences cascaded. Britain, Russia, and the Netherlands extracted similar treaties within months. The Harris Treaty of 1858 opened full commercial relations. Each concession was a humiliation that the shogunate's domestic enemies catalogued carefully. The decision to sign — the bakufu had even, for the first time, consulted the imperial court before agreeing, inadvertently elevating the emperor as a political actor — fueled the sonnō jōi (尊王攘夷, revere the emperor, expel the barbarians) movement that would spend the next decade tearing Japan apart. Former samurai, now political radicals, killed foreign diplomats and attacked the vessels of Western powers. The Tokugawa shogunate, weakened by the perception that it had capitulated to the guns in the bay, collapsed in 1868.

Fourteen years separated that dinner party from the end of the shogunate. Perry's whiskey had done its work.