The Americans in Japan 7

Americans_page_07_slice_01Americans_page_07_slice_02

Americans_page_07_slice_03

Americans_page_07_slice_04

Americans_page_07_slice_05

Americans_page_07_slice_06

Americans_page_07_slice_07

Americans_page_07_slice_08

Americans_page_07_slice_09

Americans_page_07_slice_10

Americans_page_07_slice_11

Americans_page_07_slice_12

Americans_page_07_slice_13

Americans_page_07_slice_14

Americans_page_07_slice_15

Americans_page_07_slice_16

Americans_page_07_slice_17

Americans_page_07_slice_18

Americans_page_07_slice_19

Americans_page_07_slice_20

Americans_page_07_slice_21

Americans_page_07_slice_22

Americans_page_07_slice_23

Americans_page_07_slice_24

Americans_page_07_slice_25

Americans_page_07_slice_26

Americans_page_07_slice_27

Americans_page_07_slice_28

Americans_page_07_slice_29

Americans_page_07_slice_30

Americans_page_07_slice_31

Americans_page_07_slice_32

Americans_page_07_slice_33

Americans_page_07_slice_34

Americans_page_07_slice_35

Americans_page_07_slice_36

Americans_page_07_slice_37

Americans_page_07_slice_38

Americans_page_07_slice_39

Americans_page_07_slice_40

Americans_page_07_slice_41

Americans_page_07_slice_42

Americans_page_07_slice_43

Americans_page_07_slice_44

Americans_page_07_slice_45

Americans_page_07_slice_46

Americans_page_07_slice_47

Americans_page_07_slice_48

Americans_page_07_slice_49

Americans_page_07_slice_50

Americans_page_07_slice_51

Americans_page_07_slice_52

Americans_page_07_slice_53

Americans_page_07_slice_54

Americans_page_07_slice_55

Americans_page_07_slice_56

Americans_page_07_slice_57

Americans_page_07_slice_58

Americans_page_07_slice_59

Americans_page_07_slice_60

The Americans In Japan
This poem erases a chapter of Robert Tomes’s 1857 The Americans in Japan, an illustrated account of Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 expedition. The chapter describes the commodore’s arrival at the largest island of the “Lew Chews” (an alternate spelling of “Ryukyus”), now called Okinawa. At the time, the Ryukyu Kingdom was an independent tributary of both Japan and China. Okinawa became Meiji Japan’s first imperial annexation in 1872, followed by Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. The United States’ colonial holdings began to grow roughly contemporaneously: in 1898, the U.S. annexed Hawai‘i, and the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam after the Spanish-American War.