Japan's Economy by Proxy in the Seventeenth Century: China, the N ...

As a testament to how concerned the Japanese authorities were with maintaining foreign trade, the bakufu repeatedly asked the Dutch if they would be able to import the same amount of goods as the Portuguese did, should the latter be expelled.⁴ The bakufu was clearly very conscious of the role of foreign trade in their own economy, and were eager to maintain that role, despite the political restrictions that were implemented.⁵ The Dutch, Chinese, and Koreans ensured that throughout the seventeenth century the Japanese economy would continue to have a huge impact on the continent, both through the sheer quantity of Asian goods brought to Japan and in the amount of Japanese precious metals distributed to various ports throughout Asia.

It would be hard to overstate the impact of the early modern Japanese economy on Asia and on the foreign merchants in Japan. With respect to Dutch sources, however, an emphasis has been placed largely on the cultural aspects of the Dutch presence in Nagasaki, with a few obvious exceptions. The influence of rangaku, or Dutch studies, has been an especially popular theme amongst western scholars who have demonstrated persuasively that the West interacted with Japanese society in several fields, from art to anatomy, even after the supposed closing of the country. Furthermore, as Marius Jansen has pointed out, because Japan was effectively divorced from direct relations with the West as whole, this period has been labeled one of seclusion, in essence eliding over the fact that the bakufu had simply chosen to orient itself towards Asia rather than towards the West.⁶ Similarly, the large body of Jesuit scholarship, by scholars such as Hubert Cieslik, concentrates (understandably) almost exclusively on the Christian persecutions of the Tokugawa period, persecutions that the Dutch, as eyewitnesses, reported quite extensively.