Sonno Joi

How do you wake up from a nightmare if you’re not asleep?

For nearly 300 years, Japan had been hermetically sealed to the outside world. When, in that pivotal year of 1854, the American Admiral Perry took the direct approach that the Dutch had been unwilling to take, the ruling Shogun knew that the dynasty was over. As the shogun began to open up to the outside world, the Sonno Joi movement called for this to be reversed...