Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, who came to Uraga in the sixth month of 1853 and brought Japan's seclusion to an end, was already dead by the time the embassy crossed to the United States in 1860. He died quietly at New York in the first month of 1858, just after the articles of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States had all been settled. Word of his death arrived the day before Harris went back to Shimoda. Even so, the party of the embassy is said to have gone out of its way to call at the house where Perry had lived.
The dog taken home from Japan
A story about the visit is said to be set down in a voyage diary left by one of those who went: that the dog Perry had taken home from Japan was greatly delighted at the sight of the embassy's party when they came to the house. That Perry got a dog during his stay in Japan and took it home with him was nothing unusual for the time. What makes the story worth telling is that the diarist gave particular space to the scene of that dog, some years later, frisking at the sight of another party come from the same Japan.
In Perry's ship, met by Perry's men
To take the visit for a chance detour would be wrong, because the embassy of 1860 was a journey on which Perry was met again at every turn.
The warship Powhatan that carried the party across the Pacific was, to begin with, the very ship in which Perry had come to Japan in 1853. Two hundred and fifty feet long, forty-five feet in the beam, eleven guns, 2,415 tons. Her crew of four hundred and thirty-one, with the embassy added, made five hundred and twelve aboard. Four guns were taken out for the envoys and cabins made to port and starboard where they had stood. Oguri's cabin lay next to those of the commodore and the captain, and a step below them, to port and starboard, were the cabins of the chief envoy Shinmi Buzen-no-kami and the vice-envoy Muragaki Awaji-no-kami. The ship that had pressed the country to open was, seven years later, carrying the envoys of the country that had opened.
The day they reached Washington was the same. They came alongside at the navy yard on the edge of the city, and the vice-envoy Muragaki Awaji-no-kami set the scene down in his Kōkai Nikki, his voyage diary, like this.
On shore men and women crowded together, climbing on to the houses and even on to the roofs to look on. Presently Dupont and the others led us ashore, and Commodore Buchanan came out to meet us; he too had come as a captain when Perry arrived in Japan. Five or six others came out and greeted us. The onlookers filled the place until there was hardly a road left, and among them were the newspaper men, running about and writing something down.
The Buchanan who met them first on landing had also come to Japan with Perry as a captain, and Muragaki took the trouble to note it. For the Japanese side, the faces that had come with Perry were by now people they knew.
The same diary notes the “newspaper men” running about in the crowd and writing something down. They heard afterwards that the papers would be printed and on sale the same day. A “photographic apparatus” was set up on the upper floor of the building opposite, taking the landing. The photographs of Oguri in America that survive in Japan today come from that occasion. It is thought that the sight of that day was what first turned Oguri's attention to the newspaper as a machinery of public report.
Most of what the embassy saw and heard from place to place had to do with public establishments: shipyards, arsenals, the mint. Among all that, a private scene set down in a voyage diary — a call at a house whose master was gone, and a meeting with the dog he left — shows how wide the diarist's interests ran.
Sources: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (quoting Muragaki Awaji-no-kami's Kōkai Nikki, his voyage diary); Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975