Foreigner for Hire The night I was asked who was the greatest--Kaei Nenma The gringo who spoke of democracy, Ranald McDonald.

Foreigner for Hire The night I was asked who was the greatest--Kaei Nenma The gringo who spoke of democracy, Ranald McDonald.

Japanese society during the Kaei era was based on a clear-cut hierarchical order with the samurai at the top. Politics was a system in which a pecking order was established, orders were issued according to that pecking order, and responsibility flowed from the top down. When a foreign ship arrived, the first thing officials checked was not only the size and firepower of the ship, but also the rank and position of the person leading it. Negotiation was the act of balancing each other's status, and authority was always considered to reside with a specific individual.

Ranaldo MacDonald, a foreigner who was present at the meeting, candidly explained the political view of Western society in response to such questions. In the United States, captains and government officials are not the source of authority; the people are the basis of authority. Positions and ranks are merely roles temporarily delegated by the people, not fixed statuses. For him, this was not an ideology but rather an everyday social assumption.

However, this explanation did not mesh decisively with the framework of the warriors' understanding. The words "the people are great" reached their ears, but they could not imagine it as a political reality. The question that was then returned was, "Who then is the greatest? This question strongly expresses the assumption that authority must always be concentrated at the top. The idea of governance without a pecking order, authority without a center, did not exist in the thinking of the status society.

This discrepancy is not due to a lack of knowledge or explanation. The word "democracy" could be translated, but the values that supported it could not be shared. The idea that the people were the source of authority was based on equality before the law and individual autonomy, and fundamentally clashed with a social order that made a sharp distinction between samurai and peasants, samurai and townspeople.

MacDonald was not arguing in the face of this disconnect. He merely said that in his society it was so. But his explanation was not only incomprehensible to the Japanese, it carried an unsettling ring that threatened to shake the order. If the people were the source of authority, who ordered and who was responsible? An idea whose answer was not clear was never received as an institution.

This conversation symbolizes the invisible barrier that Japan faced just before the end of the Edo period. While technology and military power could be compared, the question of where to place political legitimacy was not easily shared. Democracy could be explained and understood as a word, but it remained in limbo in a society based on status order. In that moment when we return to the question of who is the greatest, the disconnection of values is quietly exposed.