As a sign that American independence was a reality, in addition to being words on a paper treaty, in 1784 a merchant ship set out from Massachusetts bound for the Far East, appropriately named the Empress of China. During the following decades trade between the United States and China continue to grow. As the United States expanded westward to the Pacific Ocean, it was inevitable that American interests in Asia would move closer to the center of America's economic and diplomatic thinking. In the decades before the Civil War the United States reached a series of commercial agreements and treaties with China, and in 1852 Commodore Matthew C. Perry took four American steamships into Tokyo Harbor, the opening movement in developing relations between United States and Japan. A Japanese-American treaty was signed in 1854, formally advancing relations between the two countries. About that time Japan set out on a journey of modernization and, as some historians have put it, the Japanese advanced several hundred years in modernization within a few decades. The period was known as the Meiji Era after the Meiji Emperor.
By 1900, as the European nations continued to develop and expand their empires, tensions arose in the Far East, generated to some extent by Russian, European and American imperialism. War eventually broke out between Russia and Japan in 1904, and Japan startled the Western world by soundly defeating a supposedly superior Russian fleet in the battle of Tsushima Strait in May, 1905. The Russo-Japanese war was of concern to both Europe and America, and in an unprecedented move, President Theodore Roosevelt offered his mediation powers to bring an end to the conflict in 1905. Roosevelt's efforts led to the Treaty of Portsmouth, ending the war, which in turn led to his being awarded the Nobel peace prize for 1906.
By that time United States and the Far East were on much closer, if somehwta troubled, terms. American Marines had been involved in the Boxer rebellion of 1900 in which Chinese Nationalists attempted to drive all foreigners out of the country. John Hay's Open Door policy was a diplomatic venture designed to guarantee that all nations would have equal opportunities to trade with China, a nation recognized everywhere as a valuable source of economic development. All of those actions increased tension, however, as China and Japan perceived American intervention in Asia as a threat to thier cultural and economic independence and military strength. The U.S. acquisition of the Philippine Islands following the Spanish-American War also raised concerns about American imperialism in asia.
Asian workers continued to enter the United States, mostly through California, during the early 1900s, and anti-Japanese feelings began to emerge, as they had over the Chinese railroads workers who had settled in ghettoes in western cities in the late 1800s. In 1906 tensions were raised when the San Francisco School Board created separate schools for Oriental children, which brought immediate protests from Asia. Subsequent treaties and agreements attempted to reassure Japan and China that the United States had no aggressive intentions toward either nation; but President Theodore Roosevelt sending the great white fleet on a world cruise which included Asia demonstrated that the United States was now a major naval power and had no fear of Japan. Complicated economic arrangements involving banking and other financial issues continued to strengthen ties between United States and China and Japan, but those complicated arrangements also created issues that continued to build into the 20th century.
As a result of Japan's participation on the side of the Allies in World War I, she was awarded control of the formerly German-held islands in the Pacific, which Japan later fortified. Those same islands had to be taken with much American blood during the Second World War.