Please Hello: America Back

Pacific Overtures' American Admiral 🇺🇸

“Please Hello” opens with an act of extraordinary compression: in roughly forty lines, the American Admiral condescends, threatens, bribes, and ultimately coerces the Japanese First Councilor Abe into signing away his nation’s sovereignty.

Today, in Pacific Overtures’ 50th anniversary year, we begin a series of essays on this extraordinary number. We’ll meet each of its ambassadors in turn, one essay per month, exploring what each power is doing, what it pretends it is doing, and what it cannot stop itself from revealing. First, the United States…

Nicholas Yenson (Perry) in Pacific Overtures at Signature Theatre. 📸: Daniel Rader

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The Language of Empire

Please hello, America back,
Commodore Perry send hello.
Also comes memorial plaque
President Fillmore wish bestow.

The American Admiral’s opening gambit is an astonishing act of linguistic mimicry, a portrait of cultural imperialism delivered through the syntax of condescension. This was, as Sondheim points out in Finishing the Hat, John Weidman’s conceit:

The Japanese would speak elegant, formalized King’s English, whereas all the foreigners would speak a pidgin form of their native language.

In the Admiral’s broken, childlike English we hear the arrogance of a nation that assumes the world writ large should accommodate its presence. The simplified syntax mirrors this view of international relations: we want something, you give it to us, everyone’s happy.

The Admiral, as well as dropping articles and using an infantile present tense, sets rhetorical trap after rhetorical trap:

Emperor read our letter? If no,
Commodore Perry very sad.
Emperor like our letter? If so,
Commodore Perry very merry,
President Fillmore still more glad.

This is a particularly chilling example of manipulation through faux-naïveté. The Admiral presents American disappointment as if it were a natural disaster to be avoided rather than a diplomatic position to be negotiated. The childlike language masks an adult threat: make us sad, and there will be consequences.

These lines also establish a pattern of what we might call bureaucratic bullying. The Admiral doesn’t introduce himself; instead, he name-drops his superiors—“Commodore Perry send hello,” “President Fillmore wish bestow”—transforming what should be diplomatic courtesy into a display of institutional power. The mere mention of an American title should, he assumes, inspire deference.

The Technology of Civilization

But we bring many recent invention:
Kerosene
And cement
And a grain
Elevator,
A machine
You can rent
Called a “train”—

Here’s one of the most insidious arguments for imperialism: technological supremacy as moral justification. Sondheim’s chosen items are brilliantly pointed: not luxuries, but infrastructure. Fuel. Building material. Storage and supply. Transport. In other words, the physical systems through which a nation’s resources are extracted, moved, and monetized. (The historical Perry expedition did in fact bring gifts of American technology, including a working model train that circled a track in front of amazed Japanese officials.)