Sakoku -- Japan's Isolation Policy
The Tokugawa shogunate issued the third and most severe of its seclusion edicts in 1635, and Japan was effectively closed for over two centuries. The measures were cumulative. Japanese were forbidden to leave the country and those abroad forbidden to return, on pain of death; the construction of ocean-going ships was prohibited; Christianity was banned outright and its practitioners hunted. The motive was political rather than xenophobic. Christianity had spread rapidly in Kyushu after Xavier's arrival in 1549, reaching perhaps 300,000 converts, and the shogunate regarded a religion whose adherents owed allegiance to a foreign pope — and whose missionaries had preceded Spanish conquest elsewhere — as an existential threat to a regime that had just ended a century of civil war. The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637, a rising of some 37,000 peasants and masterless samurai under Christian banners, was suppressed with almost total slaughter and confirmed the policy. The Portuguese were expelled in 1639, and an embassy sent to plead was executed on arrival. What remained was deliberately narrow: a Dutch factory confined to Dejima, an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, with a few ships a year; Chinese trade at Nagasaki; Korean embassies through Tsushima; and the Ryukyus and Ainu trade through Satsuma and Matsumae. Historians now argue that sakoku overstates it — Japan was regulating foreign contact rather than abolishing it, and Dutch books carried European science in through a scholarly tradition called rangaku. Commodore Perry's squadron ended it in 1853. Two and a half centuries of internal peace and of a culture developing largely without outside reference are what the policy actually produced.
- Year: 1635 CE
- Category: Political
