Shimoda

• Japanese: 下田 (Shimoda)

Shimoda is a port city on the Izu peninsula in Shizuoka prefecture. It is known as one of the first treaty ports to be opened in Japan, along with Hakodate, in 1854.

Despite the prominence of its Bakumatsu history, however, Shimoda was already a prominent location since even prior to the Edo period. A siege of Shimoda took place in the 1590s.

The privileges granted to the Americans and British in these 1854 agreements were extended to the Russians in the Treaty of Shimoda, signed on 1854/12/21 (on the Japanese calendar) at Chôraku-ji in Shimoda and ratified nearly two years later in St. Petersburg. This treaty is also notable for being the first to officially set agreed-upon national borders between Japan and Russia in regards to the Kuril Islands, and indeed the first to set modern national borders for Japan at all.