ABSTRACT
On the night of July 8, 1853, just after Americans first anchored in Japanese waters (at Uraga, south of Edo, the capital), a comet swept across the sky about midnight “in the form of a red wedge-shaped tail.” The comet trailed bright sparks, bathing the four American steamships in a strange blue light during its appearance from midnight to dawn. The officer of the watch on Perry’s flagship, the Mississippi, observed that the appearance of the comet was an omen “promising favorable issue to our effort to bring a singular and halfbarbarous people into the family of civilized nations, without bloodshed.”1
