Townsend Harris (1804–1878) was a successful New York City merchant and minor politician, and the first United States Consul General to Japan. He negotiated the "Harris Treaty" between the U.S. and Japan.

Harris was born in Sandy Hill, in Washington County in upstate New York. He moved early to New York City, where he became a successful merchant and importer from China.

In 1846 Harris joined the New York City Board of Education, serving as its president from 1846-48. He founded the Free Academy of the City of New York, which later became the City College of New York, to provide education to the city's working people. A city high school bearing Harris's name, Townsend Harris High School, soon emerged as a separate entity out of the Free Academy's secondary-level curriculum; the school survived until 1942 (when Fiorello LaGuardia closed it because of budget constraints), and it was re-created in 1984 as a public magnet school for the humanities.

In 1855 President Franklin Pierce named Harris Consul General to Japan, and Harris became on his arrival in 1856 the first American diplomat to reside in Japan. After two years of negotiation marked by deadlock and cultural clashes, he successfully negotiated the "Treaty of Peace and Commerce," or the Harris Treaty, in 1858, securing trade between the U.S. and Japan and paving the way for greater Western influence in Japan's economy and politics. He returned to the U.S. in 1861.

Harris was portrayed by John Wayne in the 1958 movie The Barbarian and the Geisha , directed by John Huston. Its plot, dealing with a love affair between Harris and a Japanese woman, is substantially fictional.

External links

• Harris biography from Consul General of Japan in New York
• Selected comments from Harris's conversation with Bakufu Grand Councillor Hotta Masayoshi on December 12, 1857