Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, nearly every account of Japanese foreign relations during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) has started with talk of a paradigm shift, away from a secluded Japan to one deeply engaged with its neighbors in East Asia. The works that prompted this reevaluation of Tokugawa Japan’s place in the world include Tashiro’s (1981, 1982) studies of trade and diplomacy with Korea; Arano’s (1988) proposal that, rather than ‘seclusion’, we apply the Chinese notion of ‘maritime prohibitions’ (J. kaikin, C. haijin) to early modern Japan; and, most important, Toby’s (1984) linking of foreign relations to assertions of Tokugawa legitimacy. A quarter century is a long time for a paradigm to be shifting. One might think that by now the field would have put outmoded views of the past securely behind it, but no idea has had such a strong grip on our perception of premodern Japan as the myth of sakoku, or national seclusion. To be sure, Japan’s contacts with the rest of the world, and particularly with Europe, were highly constrained from the time of the expulsion of Iberian traders and missionaries in 1639 to the opening of the first treaty ports in 1855. The difference between this relative isolation and outright national seclusion is a question of intent: as Toby and others have demonstrated, the shogun Iemitsu and his advisers had no notion they were secluding Japan from Europe (much less East Asia) when they concluded the only way to control Christianity was to bar Spanish and Portuguese vessels. To underscore this point, Toby (1984: 12–13) notes that the term sakoku—literally, the ‘closed country’—was not coined until 1809, and even then only in the translation of a foreign work.