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

caused friction with the governments that viewed them as a source of competition. There were also instances, especially in Siam, of Japanese getting involved with local politics, and such instances almost always ended badly for the Japanese residents in those areas.⁴⁴

To sum up Japan's position with respect to the rest of the world in the decades before the sakoku period, Japanese people were living in great numbers in various parts of Asia; Japanese ships were plying the waters of Asia regularly with large cargoes of Japanese precious metals; Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English merchants were coming to Japan to trade and proselytize; and Japanese merchants carried on a yearly trade with Korea that rivaled any trade carried on with the Europeans.⁴⁵ Yet by 1640, this picture would be completely changed. Japanese would no longer be allowed to travel abroad on pain of death; no Japanese would be allowed to return from abroad, also on pain of death; the Spanish and Portuguese would be banned from coming to Japan; Christianity would be subjected to a ferocious and thorough persecution that all but eradicated the religion from Japan; and the Dutch would be confined to a man-made island in the harbor of Nagasaki called Deshima.⁴⁶ The sheer starkness of this “foreign and domestic policy” reversal, to speak in modern terms, begs for an explanation. I attempt in the following pages to provide such an explanation and in so doing argue that the policy of sakoku was not a monolithic piece of legislation that irrevocably cut off Japan from the outside world but rather a series of edicts in response to specific historical stimuli. I also show that the sakoku edicts represented an evolution of Tokugawa power that neither started with the actual edicts themselves nor ended with them but took shape over a period of several decades as the Tokugawa consolidated control over the country.

Methodology

The strategy that I have followed in elucidating the formation of the sakoku policy is to use the definitive version of the edicts of 1635 as a starting point. In that year, the shogun Iemitsu (grandson of Ieyasu) and his shogunal advisers issued the final version of the edicts that came