The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony By Micha ...

The fifth chapter outlines the bakufu's general expulsion decrees of the late 1630s, which essentially expelled Japanese women who had children with either the Portuguese or the Dutch. The sixth chapter discusses the transfer of the Dutch in Japan to the island of Deshima, and, finally, I summarize the results of my investigations into the evolution of the sakoku system and place those results in a historical context.

The Edicts

I have provided the entire text of the sakoku edicts so that it is possible to read them as they were intended to be issued—as a whole document. The edicts were composed in Edo by the shogunal council and then dispatched to Nagasaki to be read to the Dutch and the Portuguese by a figure called the Nagasaki bugy.⁴⁹ The bugy can be thought of as governors, and in the period discussed here, there were always two such officials at any one time who rotated between Edo and Nagasaki. Whereas the territory surrounding Nagasaki was not directly controlled by Tokugawa vassals, and technically the Tokugawa had no overt control there, the city itself was claimed by Ieyasu to be the exclusive purview of the Tokugawa. As such, Nagasaki was designated as directly controlled territory, giving the Tokugawa the right to station their own officials there and to control all aspects of the city's governance, including foreign trade. This was a common strategy the Tokugawa used to establish control over vital and strategic interests such as silver and gold mines or, in this case, the major hub of foreign trade.

The sakoku edicts became binding law with their issuance in 1635 and, with slight revisions, remained as such for the balance of the Tokugawa period—the one exception being that the system for distributing silk as spelled out in edicts 12 and 16 was eliminated in the mid-seventeenth century, as is pointed out in chapter three. In the succeeding chapters, I analyze each article within the aforementioned framework by giving a brief background to each item and describing how the edict was to be enforced and what effect it had on Japan's relations with the outside world. By so doing, I hope to illustrate the historical stimuli that