Chapter 301: The Black Ships and the Strangers' Graves

For two hundred years Japan had watched the sea through four gates. On the eighth of July, 1853, four ships came into the bay at Uraga, Near Edo, two of them steaming against the wind, the weights Of their smoke black on the summer sky. The *kurofune*. The saga Of the locked country ended in an afternoon. Commodore Matthew Perry Of the United States would not go to Nagasaki, where foreigners were sent, Would not deal with minor officials, carried a letter from his president, the merry And iron courtesy of guns, and said: I will come back for the answer. He went, And came back in February with nine ships, and the shogun's men, Who had watched the Qing lose their wars with the British, knew What the guns meant. On the thirty-first of March, 1854, at Kanagawa, the pen Of the treaty opened two ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, to American ships, the true End of the Tokugawa world beginning. Perry gave gifts: a little steam train, On a circle of track, that the samurai rode, sitting on its roof, their robes in the wind; A telegraph; and the Japanese gave silk and lacquer, and sumo wrestlers, the strain Of their strength carrying rice bales, to show what the land could do. And the pinned Hope of a young samurai, Yoshida Shōin, who rowed out to the American flagship At night in Shimoda to beg to be taken to America to learn: They sent him back. He was jailed, and taught from his prison, and the grip Of his students would make the new Japan; and he was executed, in turn, In 1859, at twenty-nine. Within fifteen years the shogunate was gone. That is the history. This is the day of the dead. Hold this: At Shimoda, at the temple of Gyokusen-ji, a Buddhist temple, the dawn Of the opening brought death too: American sailors who died of illness, the abyss Of a foreign shore, were buried in the temple's ground in 1854. And the next winter, a Russian frigate, the *Diana*, come to make a treaty too, Was wrecked by the tsunami of the great earthquake, and more Strangers' graves were dug at Gyokusen-ji. And the monks, who knew Nothing of their faith and nothing of their families, kept them. They keep them still. Every year the monks of Shimoda tend the graves Of sailors from the other side of the world, the hem Of the opening of Japan, the ones the black ships brought who were not saved. That is the Eve of Ancestors: a temple keeping the dead of strangers As its own. The opening of Japan was guns and treaties and a world Forced open. And it was also this: the monks who saw the dangers Of the foreigners, and buried their dead, and kept the stones, and the curled Incense smoke over the names of men they never knew. On this night, when the veil between the living and the dead is thin, Keep the strangers' dead too. Not only your own. The few Who die far from home are someone's ancestors. Let them in. And the opening opened other things: twelve years later, at Ōura, The hidden Christians came to the French priest and said, our hearts are the same as yours. Without the black ships, no church at Nagasaki, no woman whispering, no Santa Maria Found. The forced door and the kept faith. The guns, and the doors Of the temple open to the dead of the enemy. All of it, one opening. Tonight, set a light for the ones buried far from their homes, The sailors at Shimoda, the soldiers in every foreign field, the beckoning Of the dead who have no one there. The temple bell. The monk who combs The moss from a Russian sailor's stone. Be that monk. Keep the dead who are not yours. They are yours. The black ships came. The country opened. The world is one family, and the strangers' graves are the trunk Of the tree too. Light the lamp. Say their names, if they are known. And if not, say: beloved.