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

prohibitions that had already been effected in both China and Korea. In fact, he stated that rather than viewing sakoku as a Japanese phenomenon, it is much more useful to think of kaikin as a general East Asian phenomenon.² Kawakatsu Heita and Hameshita Takeshi further noted that rather than viewing the sakoku period as an indiscriminate case of closure, one should view it as an effort on the part of the Tokugawa to choose, on their own terms, with whom to trade, based on Tokugawa strategic political and economic goals.³

The very term sakoku is a misleading one because it implies that Japan made a conscious decision to separate itself from the outside world and that isolation was the driving motive. It is known that, at least around the first century of the Tokugawa period (which lasted from 1603 to 1868), isolation was certainly not the case. The founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu, took special pains to reestablish friendly relations with Korea, a relationship that had been much maligned in the decades preceding Tokugawa control. Ieyasu also made it clear that he would accept relations with Southeast Asian countries such as Tonkin, Ayutthaya, Annam, and the Philippines, and he authorized Japanese merchants to travel to those countries for trade. He also warmly welcomed European traders to the shores of Japan, even taking into his employ the famed William Adams and welcoming the English and Dutch when they asked to establish “factories” in Japan. He allowed both the Portuguese and the Spanish to maintain their rather vigorous trade in Japan and, although he proscribed missionary activity, was willing to try to separate trade and religion. Separating trade from religion did not mean tolerating both separately, like the American separation of church and state, but rather meant trying to ban religion altogether while still maintaining trade with Portugal. Only when that failed did his descendants take the drastic measure of banning first the Spanish and then the Portuguese from trading with their country. And finally, although Japan never did establish official relations with the Chinese, a robust unofficial trade was permitted to occur at Nagasaki, especially after the middle of the seventeenth century, when the disorder of the Qing conquest was over. Therefore, at least initially, the Tokugawa were anything but isolationist in their outlook on the world, both the East and the West.⁴