I'm sure I could improve your life by forcing you to do certain things at gunpoint: are you eating right, saving the maximum possible for retirement, using your time as efficiently as possible, gentle in your relations with everyone?
Whether some Japanese derived some benefit from the ultimatum doesn't change that it was a coercive relationship, enforced by a nation with a history of destructive exploitation of other nations and races, justifying its exploitation in terms of cultural and racial superiority over its subject people. Your argument is straight out of "White Man's Burden."
I think I know a bit more about he subject than you, having studied the Edo era academically and being a licensed instructor in the military techniques carried down by one family of Tokugawa bodyguards, including the oral history that comes with that.
That era was a shitshow ruled over by oppressive sociopathic samurai where life was short, domineering, and often brutal. They kept their country isolated from technology for the only reason of disempowering potential reformers. It is only looked back with fondness by those whose naïveté keeps them from knowing better, or who have nationalistic political agendas.
The gunboat diplomacy was frankly a move of liberation that benefited the people of Japan. And it was not an occupation either -- fair trading terms were what was offered, by the standards of the day, a far better deal than China had for example. Japan was enabled by the deal, turned into a prosperous trading partner and world superpower a mere 40 years later.
I don't know what lense you are looking at his through, but it is not refracting history correctly.
You are correct, but it's orthogonal to anything I said. The point I was making is that feudal Japan was an oppressive, nasty place and gunboat diplomacy, while not bloodless (see the internal conflicts of the Meiji Restoration), was a much smoother transition to prosperity for the inhabitants of Japan than alternative interventions being tried elsewhere.
I don't buy the line that coercive actions are necessarily wrong. Using force to remove a dictator that is oppressing its people (or an entire caste of brutal autocrats) is morally justifiable IMHO. And if you compare the American involvement in Japan with the other sorts of things that were going on at the time in East Asia, it was pretty tame.
Historians must restrict themselves to evaluating choices by the standards of the time under consideration. And by the standards of day, the Japanese got a pretty good deal, especially when compared with their neighbors.
The two are incomparable. A mere 40 years after Perry sailed into Tokyo bay, Japan went from backwater feudal island to an industrial superpower and unshackled itself from the unequal treaties, asserting its dominance on the international stage as an independent, sovereign nation. Nearly 70 years after the fall of the Dalai Lama's regime the people of Tibet are still largely poor and marginalized, with their cities and resources taken over by the occupying Han Chinese that claim the land as their own. The subsidies given to Han Chinese that relocate are straight out of the manifest destiny playbook. So I'm not really sure what point of comparison you are trying to make.
