Kanrin Maru was Japan's first sail and screw-driven steam corvette (the first steam-driven Japanese warship, Kankō Maru, was a side-wheeler). She was ordered in 1853 from the Netherlands, the only Western country with which Japan had diplomatic relations throughout its period of sakoku (seclusion), by the shōguns government, the Bakufu. She was delivered on September 21, 1857 (with the name Japan), by Lt. Willem Huyssen van Kattendijke of the Dutch navy. The ship was used at the newly established Naval School of Nagasaki in order to build up knowledge of Western warship technology. Kanrin Maru, as a screw-driven steam warship, represented a new technological advance in warship design which had been introduced in the West only ten years earlier with . The ship was built by Fop Smit's in Kinderdijk, the Netherlands later known as L. Smit en Zoon. The virtually identical screw-steamship with schooner-rig Bali of the Dutch navy was also built here in 1856. She allowed Japan to get its first experience with some of the newest advances in ship design. Japanese embassy to the US Three years later, the Bakufu sent Kanrin Maru on a mission to the United States, clearly wanting to make a point to the world that Japan had now mastered western navigation techniques and western ship technologies. On 9 February 1860 (18 January in the Japanese calendar), the Kanrin Maru, captained by Katsu Kaishū together with John Manjiro, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and a total of 96 Japanese sailors, and the American officer John M. Brooke, left Uraga for San Francisco. This became the second official Japanese embassy to cross the Pacific Ocean, around 250 years after the embassy of Hasekura Tsunenaga to Mexico and then Europe in 1614, aboard the Japanese-built galleon . Kanrin Maru was accompanied by a United States Navy ship, the and arrived in San Francisco on March 17, 1860. The official objective of the mission was to send the first ever Japanese embassy to the US, and to ratify the new treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation between the United States and Japan. Reclamation of the Bonin Islands In January 1861, "Kanrin Maru" was dispatched to the Bonin Islands, also known as Ogasawara Islands in Japanese. A navigator aboard the diplomatic mission, Bankichi Matsuoka was sent to survey the islands. The shogunate of Japan first claimed the Pacific islands and its multi-ethnical settler community in the face of competing Western