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Preface
Throughout the 1630s, the Tokugawa bakufu, which came to power in 1603 with the assumption of Tokugawa Ieyasu to the position of shogun, established a system of foreign relations that has come to be known collectively as sakoku, which is generally translated as “closed country.” Although the sakoku phenomenon is widely regarded as one of the distinguishing characteristics of Japan's early modern period, there has been comparatively little comprehensive study of the sakoku policy in English. Rather, most scholarly works take the existence of the policy for granted in their studies and do not address specifically the various edicts that together make up Japan's “foreign policy,” to use a modern term anachronistically. That is to say, scholars tend to use sakoku as a historical backdrop to their own work, but the edicts themselves have gone relatively unscrutinized. This work makes an initial attempt to remedy that gap in the scholarship.
In this book, I lay out the basic framework for Japan's foreign policy during the formative years of the early modern period, from the last decades of the sixteenth century through the first half of the seventeenth