Enshrined Diplomat

HE OPENED THE DOOR OF JAPAN--Carl Crow--Harper ($3).

Commodore Perry got his foot in, but it was Townsend Harris who opened the door of Japan wide enough to let the traders in. Who Townsend Harris was, few U. S. citizens know. But he is a hero in Japan; his two residences--the consulate at Shimoda and the legation at Tokyo are preserved as shrines. The first U. S. Consul General to Japan, Townsend Harris in 1858 negotiated the first effective commercial treaty between the U. S. and Japan--a feat which historians have ranked with the world's leading diplomatic successes.

But Carl Crow (400 Million Customers), ex-Far East adman, is no diplomatic historian. The career of Townsend Harris interests him for its suggestion of Gilbert & Sullivan, its overtones of the Pandora Box story.

At 43, a prosperous Manhattan businessman and president of the New York Board of Education, Harris took suddenly to drink. Two years later, disgraced, he sailed for the Far East, became one of the most popular traders on the China Coast. He got the consular job because few wanted it, and because he was a bachelor--the Japanese wanted no foreign women in Japan.

The first foreigner (except for members of the tiny Dutch colony at Deshima) to live in Japan since the expulsion of the Catholic missionaries in 1638, Harris had no battleships to back him. The State Department left him to shift for himself. The Japanese distinctly did not want him around, Commodore Perry notwithstanding. They asked him to go home on the ship he came on. When he refused, they set a cheeky guard around his miserable house, prohibited his traveling more than seven miles from the dismal fishing village of Shimoda, gave him diseased chickens to eat, picked on his Chinese servants while refusing to let Japanese work for him, evaded, stalled, levied a staggering rate of exchange. Their diplomatic technique was to say yes and do nothing. Harris' technique was stubbornness, honesty, hospitality. It was four years before he cut through ice and red tape to reach the Emperor. Yet so well did he succeed at the palace that when the British came along a few weeks later they only had to travel to the palace in Harris' palanquin to have their treaty signed in no time.

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