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.
Mostly from reading Buruma's Inventing Japan, and Dower's War Without Mercy and Embracing Defeat.
The fact that the pre-Perry regime was nasty has no bearing on the causal factors of Japan's later imperialism