Samurai and Guerrillas: The First Official Japanese Visit

In June, 1860, a Japanese diplomatic mission visited Washington, DC, and then toured Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The first official Japanese visit to a Western nation, the delegation was composed of seventy-seven samurai. They created a sensation with their exotic clothing, not least for throwing the rigid male-female gender dichotomy and racial order of mid-century America into turmoil.

Scholar Ikuko Asaka writes that news coverage of the mission used already-established orientalist...