Gyokusenji Temple

Where the American Flag First Flew Over Japan

On a low rise overlooking Shimoda Harbor, a Sōtō Zen temple called Gyokusen-ji holds one of the strangest distinctions in Japanese architecture. For two years and ten months in the late 1850s, its wooden main hall served as the office, bedroom, dining room, and reception space of Townsend Harris, the first American consul general to reside in Japan. The Stars and Stripes flew in the courtyard. Diplomatic dispatches were drafted on a desk set up in a former tatami room. The American consulate of the United States existed, for a time, inside a Japanese Zen temple.

Gyokusen-ji was designated a National Historic Site on June 9, 1951, with the citation noting its role as the country's first American consular post and a key venue of late-Tokugawa diplomacy. The buildings, the foreign cemetery on the slope behind, and the cluster of stone monuments around the gate together preserve a remarkably intact fragment of the year Japan opened to the world.

A 16th-Century Country Temple Becomes a Consulate

The temple's earliest origins are vague. Records describe it as a Shingon-school hermitage of unknown founding date. During the Tenshō era (1573–1592), a wandering Sōtō Zen monk named Ichirei Shun'ei reconsecrated the site as a Zen temple of the Sōtō school, giving it the mountain name Zuiryū-zan and installing Shakyamuni Buddha as the principal image. That conversion is the temple's institutional starting point; its priests have been Sōtō Zen for more than four centuries.

The current main hall is much newer. It was rebuilt in 1848 (Kaei 1) on the present site at the foot of the Suzaki peninsula, six years before Commodore Matthew Perry's second visit opened Shimoda to American ships. The hall measures seven ken across the front and six ken deep, roofed in the four-sided yosemune hip-roof style typical of mid-Edo-period rural temple architecture. The interior layout, with formal rooms divided by sliding partitions, is what would later make the hall workable as a consulate. Harris's bedroom, sitting room, and office, together with the adjacent two rooms used by his interpreter Henry Heusken, can still be identified by their original positions.

The 1854 Treaties and the First Foreign Cemetery

The Convention of Kanagawa, signed in March 1854 between Perry and the Tokugawa shogunate, ended Japan's two-century policy of strict maritime seclusion and opened Hakodate and Shimoda to American ships. Two months later a thirteen-article supplementary agreement, the Shimoda Treaty, designated Gyokusen-ji together with Ryōsen-ji as temples where American visitors could rest and where Americans who died at the port could be buried.

Five American sailors from Perry's fleet were interred in the temple grounds that year. They were the first non-Japanese burials officially permitted on Japanese soil, and their graves still stand on the wooded slope above the main hall. Three Russian sailors from the frigate Diana, which sank off the Izu coast after the Ansei Tōkai earthquake of December 1854, were buried later in the same cemetery, alongside one sailor from the Russian corvette Askold. Together the nine graves form what is generally cited as Japan's oldest standing foreign cemetery.

Russian admiral Yevfimy Putyatin used Gyokusen-ji as one of the venues for negotiating the Russo-Japanese Treaty of Shimoda, signed in February 1855. The temple thus held a working role in both the American and Russian treaties of the opening period, a coincidence that the temple's foundation history does not entirely explain.

Townsend Harris in Residence, 1856–1859

The USS San Jacinto, a screw frigate of the United States East India Squadron, reached Shimoda on August 21, 1856, carrying Townsend Harris and Henry Heusken. The shogunate had not invited Harris. Local officials spent weeks attempting to dissuade him from coming ashore, and only after persistent argument did he disembark and take up residence in Gyokusen-ji. In early September the American flag was raised over the temple grounds for the first time, an event the temple still commemorates each year.

Harris spent two years and ten months in the main hall. He was alone except for Heusken, his Dutch-speaking interpreter, and a handful of local servants. He kept a detailed diary that remains a primary source on the period. He drafted the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858, often called the Harris Treaty, while based here, and his persistent diplomacy without the threat of force has been credited with helping Japan avoid the colonial outcome that fell on much of Southeast Asia. The consulate at Gyokusen-ji closed in May 1859 when Harris moved to a new legation at Zenpuku-ji in Edo.

Two minor monuments in the grounds record details of foreign life unfamiliar to mid-19th-century Japan. The Tōgyūboku Kuyōtō is a small stone raised in apology to the cattle slaughtered to feed the consulate; the practice of beef-eating had no Japanese precedent. The Milk Monument (牛乳の碑) records Harris's request for fresh cow's milk, then almost unknown as food. Both stones still stand a few paces from the main hall.

The Harris Memorial Museum and the Grounds Today

The Harris Memorial Museum stands behind the main hall in a low modern building, set into the slope. Its collection includes Harris's personal effects, the diary of Hamada Yoheiji, the village headman of Kakizaki, whose meticulous notes give one of the closest local accounts of consular daily life, and personal items associated with Saitō Kichi, the young woman remembered as Tōjin Okichi whose tragic story became attached to Harris in later folklore. The museum also holds what is regarded as the oldest daguerreotype photograph taken in Japan, made by Russian naval officer Alexander Mozhaisky from the Diana.

Near the main path a bronze memorial bust of Harris commemorates his work; the monument was erected in 1927 by the industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi. On June 27, 1979 President Jimmy Carter visited Gyokusen-ji, the first sitting U.S. president to do so. The granite marker recording his visit stands beside the bust.

Visiting Gyokusen-ji

The temple sits about two kilometers east of Izukyū-Shimoda Station, the southern terminus of the Izu Kyūkō Line. Walking takes around 25 minutes through the quiet residential streets of Kakizaki, passing the small Kakizaki Shrine and dropping down toward the coast. By bus, take any service bound for Suzaki or Tsumeki-zaki from the station and alight at Kakizaki-jinja-mae; the temple is two minutes from the stop.

The temple grounds are open year-round. Admission to the Harris Memorial Museum is 500 yen for adults and 200 yen for elementary and middle-school students; the museum opens at 8:30 and closes at 16:30. Photography is permitted in the grounds but not inside the museum. A visit of about ninety minutes covers the main hall, museum, monuments, and cemetery without rush. Many visitors combine the temple with Ryōsen-ji, the other treaty temple, located closer to central Shimoda and reached in roughly ten minutes by car or thirty by foot.