The Napoleonic Wars did briefly touch Japan despite the efforts of the Tokugawa Shogunate to limit foreign contacts. In 1808, the British frigate Phaeton surreptitiously entered Nagasaki harbor under a Dutch flag in an attempt to capture Dutch shipping (as the Dutch were on the side of Napoleonic France). Despite arousing some suspicions for arriving unusually late for a Dutch ship, a party of Japanese inspectors and two Dutch clerks were dispatched to meet the ship. The crew of the Phaeton kidnapped the two clerks and held them hostage in exchange for food and fuel.
The confusion and panic that the Phaeton inspired was captured in a diary kept by an assistant to the magistrate of Nagasaki named Tokuemon (which was summarized by WS Aston in Volume 7 of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan published in 1879). Tokuemon’s accounts noted that the identity of the attacker was initially ambiguous, with speculation that they may be Russian. The inhabitants of Nagasaki fled to the hills when numerous (and ultimately false) reports came in of the mysterious warship dispatching boats to capture local vessels and destroy infrastructure and Tokuemon spent an entire night futilely rushing about with a spear in hand (emphasizing how antiquated the Tokugawa defense system was in Nagasaki) trying to repel rumored landings of enemy sailors. Meanwhile the Nagasaki magistrate, Matsudaira Yasuhira, was attempting to brainstorm any means of resolving this hostage crisis though he was severely limited by the lack of both resources and manpower.
The Phaeton had 48 cannons; the Nagasaki harbor defenses in comparison were simultaneously pathetic and undermanned. There should have been 1000 troops from the Saga domain present to man the defenses, but when the Phaeton arrived there were only between 50 and 60! A Russian visitor to Nagasaki in 1804 had noted that the shore batteries of Nagasaki were like “children’s toys”; Several employees at the Dutch factory on Deshima in Nagasaki also had a similar low opinion of Nagasaki’s harbor defenses – the cannons were antiquities stolen from the Portuguese in the 17th century, they didn’t have gun carriages and the troops were armed with bows and matchlocks. In short, the Phaeton had a handy advantage in any potential conflict and so the Japanese had no recourse but to hand over the supplies to the Phaeton, which then departed after releasing the Dutchmen. Matsudaira Yasuhira subsequently committed suicide in atonement for his failures.
The incursion of the Phaeton coupled with clashes with the Russians in the north inspired a series of reforms and punishments – forts in Edo, Nagasaki and Hakodate were enlarged and their armament overhauled; the Nabeshima rulers of the Saga domain were punished for neglecting the defenses of Nagasaki and research into Western arms and military science was encouraged and the translation of Western books pertaining to military science was carried out. One of the innovators of Japanese military science who emerged during this period and as a result of the aforementioned efforts was Takashima Shūhan, who was the son of a Nagasaki official who had managed to survive the disgrace of the Phaeton incident. His father was a practitioner and an instructor of a form of Japanese musketry known as Ogino-ryū; in the wake of the Phaeton incident, the elder Takashima began studying Western musketry and his son followed suit by approaching the Dutch at Deshima to secure hands-on experience in Western military craft. Unfortunately, the traders at Deshima had little experience and so Takashima Shūhan’s efforts were frustrated until the arrival of a Napoleonic veteran, Johan Wilhelm de Sturler to Deshima in 1823. Under the tutelage of de Sturler, Takashima Shūhan formulated his own school of musketry called Takashima-ryū. The school taught students how to maintain and use an assortment of artillery as well as flintlock muskets (as opposed to traditional matchlock muskets) and instruction was provided on Western style marching and firing drills. As Takashima Shūhan was also an government official in Nagasaki, he could leverage his position to import Western firearms and artillery pieces for use in his school. The Takashima school of musketry gained national prominence in the wake of the First Opium War and he and his students were called in to demonstrate Western artillery and musketry in front of the Tokugawa Shogunate’s most senior councilors in 1841. The relative success of this demonstration would inspire the transmission of Western military practice across Japan despite severe personal setbacks inflicted upon Takashima himself due to jealous rivals. In the end, the Phaeton incident inspired a severe overhaul of Japan’s naval defenses and inspired research into and adoption of Western military techniques and technology by innovators such as Takashima Shūhan.
While the majority of this post is focused on Japan, we should briefly touch upon the influence of the Napoleonic Wars in India. While Napoleon was conducting his campaign in Egypt and the Levant in 1799, British troops (some commanded by a certain Arthur Wellesley) were storming Seringapatam in Mysore thereby ending the career of one of the most formidable opponents of British power in Southern India, Tipu Sultan. As the new British governor of Seringapatam, Arthur Wellesley was settling into his newly conquered domain, a letter arrived from Napoleon intended for the now-dead Tipu Sultan informing him of Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt with an “innumerable and invincible army filled with the desire to deliver you [Tipu Sultan] from the iron yoke of England.” This correspondence was the last in a sustained diplomatic engagement between France and Mysore which stretched back to Tipu Sultan’s predecessor (and father) Hyder Ali. Some highlights of this engagement include the overtures of Tipu to Bourbon France for an alliance against the British in 1787; this mission was particularly notable as it was the first time an Indian ruler had dispatched emissaries to Europe and it created quite a stir in France. After the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, Tipu would engage Revolutionary France in hopes of acquiring troops to overthrow the British though his diplomatic mission to Ile de France (modern day Mauritius) would only yield a few hundred recruits; Napoleon also harbored a fanciful idea of using Egypt as a staging ground for invading India and overthrowing the British with the help of the Marathas, Sikhs and other princes hostile to the British though this dream died due to the reverses faced by the French in Egypt and the Levant and the defeat of Tipu in 1799; despite the dismal end to the Egyptian campaign, Napoleon would retain dreams of conquering India (with the help of Russia) later into his career.
With the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, veterans of Napoleon’s armies such as Jean Francois Allard, Claude August Court, Paolo Avitable and Jean Baptiste Ventura would find employment in Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom in Punjab (as well as other powers across Asia). Avitable and Court would assist the Sikhs in casting field artillery patterned along French lines while the rest would assist in raising infantry and cavalry battalions trained, armed and uniformed (barring the Sikh turban) in the French style.
So India played a tangential but influential role in Napoleon’s Egypt campaign. The Phaeton Incident would shake the Tokugawa Shogunate out of its torpor and inspire some degree of military reform and curiosity about advances in Western military science. The end of the Napoleonic Wars saw the dispersal of veterans across the globe and the transmission of their military knowledge to various Asian powers. On a final note, Japan received news of the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1817 and the story of the rise and fall of Napoleon inspired a poem by the philosopher and historian, Rai San’yō eulogizing him and a history documenting his career, Napoleon kōbō ki. This demonstrates the allure of Napoleon to even those far removed from his direct influence.
Sources:
Arima, S. (1964). The western influence on Japanese military science, shipbuilding, and Navigation. Monumenta Nipponica, 19(3/4), 352. https://doi.org/10.2307/2383177
Aston, W. S. (1879). HMS "Phaeton" At Nagasaki in 1808. In The transactions of the asiatic society of japan (Vol. 7, pp. 329–344). essay, Asiatic Society of Japan.
Barua, P. (1994). Military developments in India, 1750-1850. The Journal of Military History, 58(4). https://doi.org/10.2307/2944270
Das, A., & Das, A. (2016). Defending British india against Napoleon: The foreign policy of governer-general lord Minto, 1807-13. The Boydell Press.
Jaundrill, D. C. (2016). Samurai to soldier: Remaking military service in Nineteenth-century Japan. Cornell University Press.
Roberts, A. (2002). Napoleon and Wellington: The Battle of Waterloo--and the Great Commanders who fought it. Simon & Schuster.
Ross, S. T. (1996). From flintlock to rifle: Infantry Tactics, 1740-1866. Frank Cass.
Yazdani, K. (2017). India, modernity and the "great divergence": Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th c.). Brill.
*Edited formatting of bibliography for better readability
Pinging /u/Marionberry_Due seeing as they asked this as a followup tp /u/LXT130J's answer on India and Japan:
Dejima would not be the only European possession in Asia targeted by Britain as part of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Macao, while leased to Portugal, a long-term British ally on the continent, was nevertheless threatened more than once by the Royal Navy in pre-emptive attacks intended to deny access to the French.
The first threat was during the close of the War of the Second Coalition. In June 1801, a Franco-Portuguese peace treaty had been concluded that provided that British ships could no longer call at Portuguese ports. Paranoid that French troops might seek to seize Macao, the Admiralty authorised the dispatch of warships to protect Macao against possible French attack; while the Portuguese authorities in Goa were notified about the naval force in November, when the Royal Navy arrived on 31 March 1802 it brought a substantial complement of troops, who were refused permission to land by the Portuguese governor of Macao, citing that he had not been forwarded any news from Goa. Qing authorities, however, were better apprised, as on 20 March the Viceroy of Liangguang, Jiqing, was informed by the East India Company's Canton Committee about the troop movements and assured them that they were there to protect both Qing and Portuguese interests in Macao against French predation. The Qing... didn't buy it as such, and the Jiaqing Emperor ordered Jiqing to refuse to allow the fleet to be supplied via Qing ports. This, it was later believed, was successful in eventually getting the fleet to leave on 29 July, but this was perhaps a little mistaken: rather, the fleet received news that the Treaty of Amiens between Britain and France had been concluded, which obviated the need for a continued military presence.
However, hostilities between Britain and France did not end forever. 1808 saw renewed fears of a French attack on Macao prompted yet another attempt to militarily reinforce the port, amid an even more severe global diplomatic situation for Britain. Firstly, France and Spain had military occupied Portugal in 1807, and it would remain under pro-Bonapartist control until a rebellion in June 1808, concurrent with the outbreak of rebellion in Spain. Secondly, the Treaty of Tilsit had allied Russia and France, thereby placing Napoleon in a dominant position not only in continental Europe, but also, potentially, in Eurasia more widely, as embryonic plans for some kind of joint Franco-Russian operation against British India via Central Asia or Iran were fomented. Thirdly, a substantial number of French cruisers were still at large in Asia, primarily based out of Java and the Philippines, forming a substantial threat to Britain's trade with China.
As part of an attempt to consolidate naval superiority in Asia, Lord Minto, Governor-General of the Indies, dispatched Vice-Admiral William Drury, commander of the East Indies Station, to send forces first to Annam to open trade, and then to Macao to defend the Portuguese settlement. Drury's attack on Annam was utterly disastrous and he arrived at Macao with just three ships: one ship of the line, one frigate, and a sloop. Even this was considered a pretty big deal for both Macanese and Qing authorities, neither of whom had any advance notice nor received any formal communication of Drury's intentions. Eventually, to quote Frederic Wakeman, (italics mine):
On 21 September, brushing aside Governor-General Wu Xiongguang's commands to depart with the observation that nothing in his instructions prevented him from going to war with China, Drury disembarked 300 marines and sepoys to take over and defend Macao's citadels.
This rather unsurprisingly was responded to with a Qing embargo on British trade, and the assembly of an army, numbering 80,000 troops on paper, to repel Drury's forces (now reinforced with a further 700 troops brought from India). Virtually no actual fighting took place, as Wu failed to actually order an attack; rather, Drury faced pressure from both East India Company captains and the Macanese government to back down, and he withdrew in December. This was nevertheless spun as a Qing military victory, with a commemorative pagoda erected in Canton afterward.
The Anglo-Macanese-Qing confrontations of 1802 and 1808 aren't just bits of trivia. Firstly, they served as points at which the Qing quite firmly asserted their refusal to allow British forces to erode Qing sovereignty in the Pearl River Delta, as well as emphasising that Macao was a Qing lease granted to Portugal, and not sovereign Portuguese territory that the Qing had no authority to prevent transfers of. But secondly, they were also critical episodes in the deterioration of Anglo-Qing relations between the Macartney Embassy in 1793 and the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839.
This deterioration, as noted, was a process that would continue past the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but we ought not to constrain ourselves to the idea that the impact of the Napoleonic Wars was restricted purely to the period of actual fighting. The post-Napoleonic order, with Britain and Russia affirmed as the major maritime and continental powers, respectively, was one which was highly conducive to the continuing diplomatic breakdown between the British and Qing Empires.
In the immediate term, the Amherst embassy, actually with more conservative goals than Macartney's, was dispatched in 1816, and failed to even achieve an audience owing to a fight breaking out outside the audience chamber! The embassy, which was conceived in the wake of Britain's post-Napoleonic supremacy, was unsurprisingly considered a disaster, not least by Napoleon himself when Amherst's embassy called at St Helena on its way back. One of the other issues afflicting the Amherst mission had been a disagreement over whether the British diplomats were to kowtow to the emperor, leading Napoleon to comment that the British had no right to impose their own ceremonial conventions overseas – if it were custom in Britain for dignitaries to kiss the king's backside, were the British going to ask the Qing emperor to drop his trousers in the audience hall?
But the British conviction in the superiority of 'Western' civilisation in general and the British Empire in particular never exactly dissipated, at least not in the period discussed, and went on to influence the growing sabre-rattling about Qing trade restrictions that brought Britain ever closer to the brink of war with China over the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Nothing, of course, was inevitable about the Opium War, but the conditions under which Britain chose to go to war in response to Lin Zexu's opium suppression campaigns were in large part the product of their victory over Napoleon, and so too was the mindset – or mindsets – that informed the decision.