ABSTRACT
The Japanese and their government paid a high price for the closed-door policy that had prevented Japan from having any meaningful foreign trade for some 200 years. From 1859, once the treaty ports were opened, those Japanese merchants who attempted to deal with the foreigners found themselves outflanked and outmanœuvred. The members of the Iwakura Mission, in 1872 and 1873, seeing in Western Europe the pride, and achievement, of Western industry, came to appreciate the huge gap between non-industrialised Japan and the developed Western world.
