The forced opening of Japan by an American squadron in 1853–54 provided the Western world with a long-awaited opportunity to freely inspect the land at the edge of the Orient. It was indeed a momentous event because for more than two centuries, only few Europeans had been able to catch a brief glimpse of the enigmatic archipelago and its legendary inhabitants. Like Napoleon, who enlisted several dozen savants for his Egyptian expedition, the squadron commander, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, recognized the historic importance of his voyage and brought along several scholars and curators to record the discovery. Perry's scientific aspirations notwithstanding, Japan was in fact anything but unknown to the new explorers. Since medieval times, ongoing scholarship regarding Japan had existed in Europe, and however dated and inaccurate, detailed accounts of its people and their customs were widely available to would-be explorers. For three centuries of actual contact, pre-1853 European scholarship on Japan showed a growing interest in the racial make-up of the Japanese. As a whole, the racial perspectives on Japan were only an offshoot of a greater discourse, a new scientific worldview that placed mankind within a broader natural system and classified human variety in term of unequal races. (Rotem Kowner)