ON THE PROFESSIONAL front, however, things were going well. Parkes had taken over as Minister to Japan just as the country was feeling more prepared to open up to the West, providing him with opportunities that had not been there during the frustrating Alcock years.

One event that helped him was the death of the Shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, at the age of twenty on 29 August 1866. He had attained the position when he was twelve and never had the chance to become an effective leader, being under the thumb of conservative forces. Another thing that helped even more was the death of Emperor Kōmei, of smallpox, at the age of thirty-six on 30 January 1867. This was entirely unexpected; he had been in good health and the strain of the disease had been mild. Many believed that he had been poisoned to avoid a catastrophic showdown with the Western powers that his extreme xenophobia might have led to. Satow put it like this: ‘it is impossible to deny that his disappearance from the political scene, leaving as his successor a boy [the fourteen-year-old Emperor Meiji] … was most opportune’.

Iemochi's successor, the twenty-nine-year-old Tokugawa Yoshinobu, was determined that Japan should improve its relations with the Western powers. At the beginning of 1867, even before he had been officially installed, he issued an invitation to the foreign representatives to meet him at Osaka castle. Previously foreign Ministers had only been granted the briefest possible audiences of the Shogun, but Yoshinobu seemed to be proposing some kind of business meeting. All Parkes’ colleagues were keen to go and make a fresh start in their relations with Japan.

Parkes was less sure. He did not want it to look as if he was at Yoshinobu's beck and call. It would be ‘gratifying’ to Yoshinobu, ‘no doubt’, he told Hammond, to have ‘foreign Ministers troop down the moment he signified to them that their presence at his Court would be acceptable’. Parkes was concerned that Yoshinobu would use the visit to tell them that Osaka would not be opened to foreign trade on 1 January 1868 after all.