 In 1862, samurai Takasugi Shinsaku, from the ruling Japanese Tokugawa shogunate, visited Shanghai on board the trade ship "Senzaimaru".Japan had been forced open by US Commodore Matthew C. Perry less than a decade earlier and the purpose of the mission was to establish how China had fared following the country's defeat in the Second Opium War (18561860).Takasugi was aware of the forward thinking exhibited by those such as Wei on the new threats posed by Western "barbarians" and later recorded in his diary