It was already evident in 1942 (the Miller volume on US treaties etc.) that the Japanese ratification documents (there are two because there were addtiional articles) do not match the description left by Adams (the USN officer who was in Japan to deal with this). However, Miller's (and his Japanese-speaking assistant's) assumption that Adams was simply "mistaken" is impossible as I will explain. The issue is that Adams says there were seven signatures with seals of Japanese officials whereas the texts we have (I have seen a scan of only one but I am assured by the Archivist that the other one is the same, and anyway Miller says so too) have SIX NAMES which are not signatures (but names written by what Miller calls a "scrivener") and NO SEALS at all. Now without signatures and seals these can only be copies, not originals. Moreover, the six vs. seven names issue is critical because Adams insisted that the ratification had to be signed and sealed by the Shogun and not just on his behalf by lower officials and threatened basically to march on Tokyo if this were not done. There was as he records a long discussion with the Japanese officials who had not wanted to do this (perhaps, as we know but he could not, because the Shogun was ill). So the documents we have appear to be copies but not of the final ratification documents but rather of the earlier ones that the Japanese had prepared WITHOUT the shogun and which Adams rejected. And since these were critiical issues for him (without which he considered the treaty to have NOT been ratified at all), it seems to follow that we would have examined the document he received carefully (as he claims to have). So while he could not read Japanese, he certainly could tell what a seal looks like (normally they were red) and the difference between six and seven. Also he says the signatures appeared in a layout different from what we have. In short, it appears that the documents held in DC and listed in the catalogues as the Japanese ratification instruments are copies of the instruments first prepared by the Japanese and rejected by Adams rather than the original instruments he managed to get a few days later. In Japan, as far as we have been able to determine, there are no originals because of a fire, and in DC I am told there is nothing else that looks like the documents described by Adams. If anybody has any ideas, please tell me.
