Japanese Embassy, Navy Yard, Washington, DC, 1860 The first Japanese delegation to the US captivated crowds and confounded expectations, as the press cast its samurai as “effeminate. By: Matthew Wills  In June, 1860, a Japanese diplomatic mission visited Washington, DC, and then toured Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The first official Japanese visit to a Western nation, the delegation was composed of seventy-seven samurai. They created a sensation with their exotic clothing, not least for throwing the rigid male-female gender dichotomy and racial order of mid-century America into turmoil. Scholar Ikuko Asaka writes that news coverage of the mission used already-established orientalist … Continue reading Samurai and Guerrillas: The First Official Japanese Visit