IN THE SUMMER of 1879, former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant visited Japan on his way back to the United States from a pleasure trip to Europe and other parts of Asia. Grant was a world celebrity. He had received many honors for having led the Union armies to victory in the American Civil War over the forces of the Confederate war hero Robert E. Lee. After the war ended, he had served as president for two terms from 1869 to 1877. He was the most illustrious guest, in both status and fame, that Japan had received since it opened itself to the world only two decades earlier.

This was a time when a trip around the world took half a year, traveling by ship. It was completely unprecedented for a former president of a big country like the United States to pay a visit to a small country like Japan in the remote Far East. The news that Grant planned to visit Japan ignited much excitement, with both the government and private individuals planning various gala welcomes for him half a year in advance.

Japan's own civil war, known as the Bōshin War, in which forces of the former Tokugawa shogunate were defeated by the troops of the new regime, had ended only eleven years earlier, and the country had just begun its first efforts to modernize under the leadership of the twenty-seven-year-old Emperor Meiji. The government was led by Grand Minister of State Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–1891) and Minister of the Right Iwakura Tomomi (1825–1883), and under the guidance of sangi councilors, including Ōkubo Toshimichi, Yamagata Aritomo, and Itō Hirobumi, the country was pouring strenuous effort into nation-building. Only two years previously, the Satsuma Rebellion had posed a major threat to the established order, so the new country was hardly on a steady footing.

The Western powers remained skeptical in their views of the country's progress toward modernization, rejecting Japan's most-fervent efforts to renegotiate the unequal treaties signed in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate. Their skepticism was understandable, as little more than a decade had passed since the country was governed in completely feudal fashion by a ruling class of two-sword-carrying samurai, not a few of whom had sworn to cut down any foreigner they might come upon.