Townsend Harris

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For the eponymous NYC high school, see Townsend Harris High School.

Townsend Harris

Born	1804 Washington County, New York, USA
Died	1878

Townsend Harris (1804–1878) was a successful New York City merchant and minor politician, and the first United States Consul General to Japan. He negotiated the "Harris Treaty" between the U.S. and Japan and is credited as the diplomat who first opened the Japanese Empire to foreign trade and culture. He gained the respect and affection of the Japanese people, and is honoured to this day in Japan.

Harris was born in the village of Sandy Hill (now Hudson Falls), in Washington County in upstate New York. He moved early to New York City, where he became a successful merchant and importer from China.

In 1846 Harris joined the New York City Board of Education, serving as its president until 1848. He founded the Free Academy of the City of New York, which later became the City College of New York, to provide education to the city's working people. A city high school bearing Harris's name, Townsend Harris High School, soon emerged as a separate entity out of the Free Academy's secondary-level curriculum; the school survived until 1942 (when Fiorello LaGuardia closed it because of budget constraints), and it was re-created in 1984 as a public magnet school for the humanities.

President Franklin Pierce named Harris the first Consul General to the Empire of Japan ^[1] in July, 1856, where he opened the first U.S. Consulate at the Gyokusen-ji Temple in the city of Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture ^[2], sometime after Commodore Perry had first opened trade between the U.S. and Japan in 1853. After two years of negotiation marked by deadlock and cultural clashes, he successfully negotiated the "Treaty of Peace and Commerce," or the Harris Treaty, in 1858, securing trade between the U.S. and Japan and paving the way for greater Western influence in Japan's economy and politics. He returned to the U.S. in 1861.

Harris was portrayed by John Wayne in the 1958 movie The Barbarian and the Geisha, directed by John Huston. Its plot, dealing with a love affair between Harris and a Japanese woman, is substantially fictional.