The Black Ships in the Harbor Again

Recently, SoftBank Group founder and CEO Masayoshi Son stood in a Tokyo hotel ballroom and told Japan’s top executives that AI-powered cyberattacks are coming. He compared the threat to being assaulted by machine guns instead of rifle shots. He invoked the Black Ships — U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in 1853 — as a metaphor for what happens when a technologically superior external force arrives on your shores and you are not ready.

It is a powerful metaphor. Son is not wrong to use it.

But Son is only telling you half the story. The half he left out is far more important — and far more uncomfortable.

First, understand what the Black Ships actually broke

Sakoku (鎖国) —— literally means “chained country.” Between 1633 and 1639, the Tokugawa Shogunate issued a series of edicts that progressively sealed Japan from the outside world. Foreign trade was banned except through a tiny Dutch trading post on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. Japanese citizens were forbidden from traveling abroad on pain of death. For 220 years, Japan developed entirely on its own terms, with no external reference point.

The policy worked, by its own logic. Japan was stable. The society was sophisticated, refined, and internally coherent. It was also sealed from everything that had happened in the world outside. The scientific revolution. The Enlightenment. The industrial revolution. Two hundred and twenty years of intellectual and technological development had occurred beyond Japan’s borders and none of it had penetrated in any meaningful way.

When Perry’s four ships entered Uraga harbor — two steam-powered frigates belching black smoke, each towing a sailing vessel — the Japanese watching from the shore had never seen a ship that moved without wind. The gap was not a matter of being a few years behind. It was civilizational.

But here is what matters most: Japan in 1853 was not just technologically behind. It was epistemologically behind. Sakoku had not just kept foreign technology out. It had kept foreign ideas out. Japan could see the threat. It could not think its way to a response. That is why what followed was not immediate transformation. It was paralysis.

It took fifteen years. A civil war. The collapse of a 250-year-old government. And only then did the Meiji Restoration begin — one of the most audacious national transformations in human history. Japan did not adapt gradually. It dismantled itself and rebuilt from the ground up. By 1905 — fifty-two years after Perry’s four ships appeared in Uraga harbor — Japan defeated Imperial Russia. A feudal society had become the dominant military and industrial power in Asia.

Son’s move — and what it actually is

Son used the Black Ships to sell urgency and, not coincidentally, a product. SoftBank has launched an AI-powered cybersecurity service for Japan’s top 3,000 companies. Buy the service. Patch the holes. Defend the perimeter.

That framing is the Shogunate response. It treats AI as something to be managed from the outside, contained, patched.

But look at what Son is actually doing beyond the Tokyo hotel ballroom. He holds nearly 90 percent of Arm Holdings, whose chip architecture sits at the foundation of virtually every AI data center being built in the world today. He has structured SB OAI Japan as the exclusive vehicle for developing and deploying AI in the Japanese market. And this month he announced a €75 billion investment to build AI data center infrastructure in France.

Son is not defending Japan from AI. He is acquiring ownership of AI at every level simultaneously. This is the Iwakura Mission with equity stakes. The Meiji reformers did not just import Western technology to survive. They they sent experts to the source overseas, absorbed technology and know-how of every kind, and used it to compete with the very powers that had threatened them. Son is doing the equivalent as a single business — using Japanese capital to become a structural owner of the technology that everyone else will depend on.

Son has understood the Black Ships lesson more completely than his product launch suggests. The question is whether anyone else in Japan is listening — and more to the point, whether you are.

Your sakoku — and how to break it

Many organizations running businesses in Japan today are operating their own version of sakoku with respect to AI. Not a formal policy. But a set of habits, structures, and cultural assumptions that effectively seal the organization from the ideas and capabilities being built outside. Headquarters approval processes that outlast AI development cycles. Consensus requirements that make irreversible commitment impossible. A risk culture that treats the downside of moving too fast as more dangerous than the downside of moving too slow.

The result is epistemological paralysis. The organization understands the threat intellectually and remains frozen practically. Perry did not just bring superior firepower. He broke the epistemological seal. AI has already done the same to organizations in Japan. The question is whether business leaders like you will respond like the Shogunate — managing, patching, waiting — or like the Meiji reformers, who used the volatility of the time to build a dominant power.

Here is what breaking your sakoku actually looks like.

Stop waiting for permission. Among the most common failure modes I see is the CEO who knows AI is transforming the business, raises it with global headquarters, gets told to wait for the global AI strategy, and waits. That was the failed Shogunate’s response. You should move first, and show results. Make the global AI strategy a fait accompli.

The CEOs who do this will matter in five years. The ones who waited for permission will be managing decline.

Decide what business you are actually in — before AI decides for you. The Meiji reformers did not try to modernize feudalism. They abolished it. What can AI help your organization achieve that it could no do before? What can your people accomplish by using AI? What kind of new value can your business contribute to the world? The CEOs who answer these questions now, on their own terms, will define their businesses. The ones who don’t will have it answered for them.

Make one irreversible commitment this quarter. Not a pilot. Not a proof of concept. Something that permanently changes the structure of the business. Irreversibility matters. The Meiji reformers understood this. Abolishing the samurai class was not a pilot program. One irreversible commitment makes transformation real.

Use the gaijin advantage. Foreign CEOs in Japan have always had more latitude to operate differently than Japanese competitors. A foreign CEO running a Japan subsidiary can move faster on AI adoption than most Japanese competitors precisely because they are not defending a century of institutional culture. The foreign CEOs who treat their Japan operation as a laboratory for AI-driven business models will be the ones who get resources, attention, and ultimately more authority.

The honest caveat

Son invoked the Black Ships. He was right to. But the full lesson of the Black Ships is not simply that a threatening force has arrived and you must defend yourself.

It is that the threatening force never stops coming. Perry broke Japan’s sakoku in 1853. AI is breaking yours now.

The Black Ships are in your harbor yet again. So what will be your Meiji Restoration?