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

How, then, did Japan come to be a “closed country” after about 1640? The answer is complicated, and the question is partly an illegitimate one, for Japan was never really “closed” entirely. Arano Yasunori asserted that the system of sakoku is really only extraordinary in an Asian context because the history of Japan has for many years been dominated by a Eurocentric worldview.⁵ According to this view, because Japan severed relations with the Spanish and the Portuguese and because they severely restricted trade with the Dutch, the country must have been in a state of isolation. Research in recent decades has clarified the misleading nature of this Eurocentric historical view of Japan's early modern period.⁶ There is no denying, however, that the Tokugawa did severely circumscribe their foreign relations, and as far as that limited sense of sakoku is concerned, I attempt to (1) lay out the series of events that led up to the sakoku edicts of the mid-1630s, (2) translate and elaborate on the decrees that make up the sakoku policy, and (3) provide a historical perspective on the significance of the sakoku decrees in Japanese history as well as in the history of the foreigners who lived and traded in Japan.

It may well be that modern notions of free trade inform views of premodern history, even if this occurs merely subconsciously, and that any restrictions placed on trade, especially when relatively free trade had prevailed previously, seem anathema to historical progress. Whatever the reasons, there is no doubt that historians have generally viewed the phenomenon of sakoku in a negative light, if only by implication. Although historians have been unanimous in recent years in accepting the limited nature of sakoku in the sense that Japan remained engaged with the Asian continent, attitudes towards the sakoku era in Japanese history are often tinged with a “what if” attitude that conveys regret—or at least something unnatural and unfortunate in the government's decision to restrict European trade with Japan and to limit the movements of the Japanese people themselves.

This work attempts to show that whatever sakoku may or may not have been, it was certainly not irrational or xenophobic, nor was it driven by a hatred of Europeans or Christianity in and of itself for that matter, though that statement would certainly come as a shock to many. The