Perry's black ships and the Japanese memory of American diplomacy

Can American suffering in the Second World War be treated as a consequence of what the United States did to Japan nearly a century earlier?

That broad claim is rejected, but Perry's arrival is treated as a contributing factor in Japanese historical attitudes toward American diplomacy.

Perry's arrival is a proposed influence on later Japanese attitudes toward the United States. That interpretation stops short of explaining all American losses in the Second World War. Different historical horizons matter here: an event dismissed as several generations old could still matter to those who remembered it as part of their national history. A participant recalls a later Japanese writer's use of Perry to justify an attempted coup, while explicitly leaving the truth of that recollection uncertain.