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

evolution—beginning with the series of restrictions before the 1630s (such as the ban on trade with the Philippines), the restriction of European trade to Hirado and Nagasaki, the ban on daimyo constructing oceangoing vessels, and the limiting of Japanese trade abroad to a few families. I then deal with the individual sakoku decrees, translating and explaining each in a larger context. Finally, I outline the major restrictions on trade, Christianity, and European activity in Japan that consolidated the sakoku system in the decades following the actual decrees. In this way, I demonstrate that Tokugawa foreign policy was not a monolithic piece of legislation instituted in a frenzy of antiforeign activity. Rather, I illustrate the evolving nature of the sakoku system and show that the system itself was conceived as a way to facilitate Tokugawa control throughout the country while at the same time eliminate any potential challenges to the Tokugawa, whether they be foreign or Japanese.

The Background

In reality, the first Europeans to encounter Japan—aside from the various literary accounts of fabulously wealthy “silver islands” somewhere in the Pacific—were the Portuguese who accidentally washed up on the shores of Tanegashima in a Chinese junk in 1543.¹⁰ These sailors relayed their “discovery” back to the Portuguese in Macao, who saw this encounter as a possibility to gain another opportunity for trade, as well as to spread the Catholic faith to new lands.¹¹ Accordingly, the Portuguese sent ships from Macao to investigate the likelihood of sustained trade with Japan. What they found in Japan was of the greatest importance—not only for trade with the archipelago but also for making their entire East Asian venture a success—for Japan was at that time only beginning to exploit on a large scale the abundant precious metals found there. European technology in terms of smelting silver ores made the large-scale processing of silver and gold in Japan possible, especially the European techniques of using either lead or mercury to separate silver from the ore in which it was found.¹² Scholars such as Kobata Atsushi and Iwao Seiichi have estimated that Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced