NEW YORK — The Museum of the City of New York has an exhibition titled "Samurai in New York: The First Japanese Delegation, 1860." The "delegation" was the first embassy dispatched by Japan in more than a millennium. The previous one, in 838, went to the Tang Dynasty court to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor. The new one went to Washington to ratify a commercial treaty.
The City Museum has come up with the show, I gather, as much because this is the 150th anniversary of the treaty ratification as because "New-York, the Jeddo of America" — as The New York Times put it in an article on June 18, 1860 — gave the 77-man party the most extravagant welcome. ("New York" was spelled with a hyphen between the two words at the time; "Jeddo" is what is today given as "Edo," though the Times also spelled it "Yedo.")
Yes, extravagant the welcome was. "The procession was one of the finest displays of the kind ever witnessed in this City," the Times reported. More than 40 carriages containing city dignitaries, the visitors and others proceeded from the Battery up Broadway, and more than 7,000 troops sallied forth for one parade after another: cavalry, Hussars, artillery.