Finally met up with this here real cowboy the other day at Mihama American Village. Wondered where he’d been hanging out.
Young pards didn’t talk much. No one around here does, though. Not in English anyhow. But he fit right in with my lectures back in about Week No. 6 of my course in American Culture & Society. Manifest destiny and all that stuff. Westward ho! Rugged individualism.
Notable that even when Commodore Perry first moored his steam-powered war ships in Tokyo Bay back in 1853 to force the Japanese leaders to open to Western whalers and traders, the notion of manifest destiny was on the minds of those Americans, too.
They had a calling and a lot of momentum. You may not know this, but Perry’s fleet stopped in Okinawa before reaching Tokyo Bay. Returned later, too.
For a lot more information about this, see this excellent MIT online presentation on Black Ships & The Samurai by esteemed scholar and historian John Dower. It goes a long way beyond young pards, here, who seems to have lost his momentum. Maybe that’s as it should be.
Where does a cowboy go after Japan?
