Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's Japan Expedition (1853-1854), the most important voyage of mid-nineteenth-century American "gunboat diplomacy," resulted in the opening of Japan to Western commerce. This study documents for the first time the expedition's "artifacts of diplomacy," an important collection representing traditional or preindustrial Japanese material culture.

Chang-su Houchins describes the range of silk textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, fans and umbrellas, bamboo and wood products, and swords and arms presented to the United States government, President Franklin Pierce, and Commodore Perry. Japanese government commissioners and officials of the Kingdom of Ryukyu gave more than one hundred gifts before and after the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854.

The monograph also surveys objects the expedition party purchased at bazaars in Hakodate and Shimoda specifically to deposit it in a national museum in Washington, D.C. Drawing on English and Japanese published and archival sources, Artifacts of Diplomacy extensively documents each artifact and presents the context of cultural contacts from both the Japanese and the American points of view.