This book brings a fresh perspective to a classic and still important historical issue: the character of the unequal treaties imposed on Japan by the West, and the character of the Japanese response to those treaties. The government's efforts to revise the treaties--and popular responses to those efforts--were a crucible for Japan's modern nationalism, just as recent efforts to revise the treaty relations between Japan and the United States have produced renewed articulations of nationalism across the political spectrum. By also bringing into view the efforts to revise the Sino-Japanese treaty of 1871, Iokibe offers a more dynamic understanding of a Meiji era history too often divided into separate histories of 'Japan and the West' and 'Japan and Asia.' He takes full account of recent works which challenge a simplistic view of the treaties as patently and obviously 'unequal' from the start. He then goes on to carefully specify the ways in which, and the moments at which, these treaties both functioned as unequal agreements and were understood to be unequal.