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"How wonderful! How marvelous! From here to the southeast is what the Westerners call the Pacific Ocean and the American states! They must be very close!" — Watanabe Kazan, artist and samurai, in a diary recording a sojourn in Enoshima, an island off Kamakura in present-day Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1821. Close indeed. Closer than he or any Japanese then knew. Just around the corner, in fact. "Intercourse shall be continued forever." — Shogun Tokugawa Iesada (under duress), to U.S. Consul Townsend Harris, 1857. In a time of both misinformation and too much information,
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