1867 Paris World's Fair

The 1867 Paris World's Fair, or Exposition Universelle, was the first World's Fair at which Japan exhibited, and was overall four times larger than any previous such exposition. Satsuma han exhibited separately from the Tokugawa shogunate at the expo, earning the shogunate's ire, and weakening the shogunate in the eyes of the world.

Preparations and Arrangements

The seed of the idea that Satsuma might present at the Fair began in 1865, when Godai Tomoatsu, along with two other Satsuma officials, was traveling in Europe seeking to expand Satsuma's commercial ties with European partners. After meeting the Belgian/French merchant Charles Comte de Montblanc and securing an agreement with him for mines, factories, and certain other arrangements in Satsuma, Godai was also offered the possibility of Montblanc helping to arrange for Satsuma to display its products at the Fair, which would be taking place two years later. Originally, the exposition organizers rejected Satsuma's proposal to display separately, but in the end, Satsuma managed to display its goods in the separate display of the supposedly independent Ryûkyû Kingdom.

Senior shogunate official Shibata Takenaka, after running into Montblanc in Paris in the ninth month of 1865, learned of these plans, and was quite angry at this turn of events, as the shogunate had hoped to display Satsuma's goods as part of its own accomplishments.

In 1866/11, karô Iwashita Masahira traveled to Paris as the head of a delegation of Satsuma officials, aboard an English vessel. The domain also sent 400 boxes of local products to Paris, including Ryukyuan textiles, sugar, lacquerwares, and pottery. After arriving in Paris early the next year, Iwashita worked with Montblanc to design and set up the Satsuma/Ryûkyû display, which described its lead patron as "His Highness Matsudaira Shuri no Daibu, Minamoto Shigehisa, Ruler of Ryukyu," a grand title which made no acknowledgement of Tokugawa authority.

References

• Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement, Harvard University Press (2009), 201-203.