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

shogun and his coterie of advisors were not primarily concerned with the theology of Christianity or the foreign customs of Europeans but were eminently concerned with maintaining their political control and expanding it at the expense of the daimyo. This is ultimately the context in which the sakoku decrees should be considered. And finally, the policy of sakoku was not a monolithic piece of legislation but rather a series of responses to specific historical stimuli. It is convenient to speak of the sakoku policy as having been suddenly implemented (just as it is convenient to conceptualize the Industrial Revolution as a single event), but in reality, it was an evolving economic and political policy that spanned well over 50 years.

Neither Toyotomi Hideyoshi nor Tokugawa Ieyasu was interested in divorcing Japan politically or economically from the rest of the world. Elizabeth Berry noted that Hideyoshi, even when banning Catholic missionaries from operating in Japan, made a special effort to convey to the Portuguese merchants that this ban would not affect in any way Portuguese trade from Macao.⁷ This may have been a somewhat unrealistic view considering the role of the missionaries as middlemen in the trade, but nevertheless, this quite clearly shows the value that Hideyoshi placed on foreign trade. Following Hideyoshi's death in 1598, Ieyasu took a similarly open stance on foreign trade. Not only did he authorize hundreds of voyages to foreign countries by Japanese merchants, but he also actively encouraged foreigners to come to Japan for trade, even allowing them territorial bases from which to conduct this trade.⁸ He also repeatedly demonstrated that he was extremely eager to learn about the world beyond his own shores and was keenly aware that foreign technology could be of great benefit to his country.⁹ Conversely, Ieyasu was a consummate political strategist, as well as an astute state builder, and was therefore quick to suppress any subversive or disruptive influences both within and outside of Japan. Likewise, the succeeding two shoguns, themselves politically astute, drafted legislation that responded to perceived threats, both foreign and domestic. It is in this context that the evolution of sakoku should be studied.

I attempt to outline in this work the evolution of the system that came to be known as sakoku, recognizing that the process was eminently an