friendship, trade, and shipping. The delegation from the United States arranged the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, which effectively opened two ports to foreign trade and provisioning. Soon, Britain and Germany sought similar arrangements. Japanese leaders were faced with opening their feudal society. In response to the growing threat of foreign incursion into their closed lands, Japanese noblemen began to mobilize their samurai vassals and to consider modernizing their military.
The Satsuma Navy
Shimazu Nariakira, the lord of Satsuma Province, quickly grew interested in building ships. He was authorized in the early 1850s as the first Japanese lord to build vessels larger than the small coastal trading and fishing boats then commonly used in Japan. He built a small fleet known by the mid-1860s as the Satsuma Navy. For his idea to build larger and armed seagoing vessels, Nariakira was immortalized as the father of the modern Japanese navy.
Because of his father's official role within Satsuma Province, Togo joined the Satsuma Navy in 1866, when he was 17 years old. In 1871, he was chosen as one of a dozen Japanese naval cadets to be given nautical training in England. The Japanese cadets were denied training at the Royal Naval College and Togo was sent to the Thames Nautical Training College in London instead.
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