Philosophical reflections on Japan’s Sakoku policy: seventeenth-century English perspectives

Abstract

ABSTRACT After the expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan in 1639, European trade with Japan was restricted to the Dutch. Doors were closed to other Western nations for the next 215 years. This isolationist policy of Japan’s is commonly known as ‘Sakoku’. This article considers how Sakoku was viewed and judged in the eyes of English thinkers in the seventeenth century working in the natural law tradition. However, such normative philosophical reflections and accounts are virtually unknown in this period. This article takes up Charles II’s letter written to the Japanese ruler in an effort to reopen trade with the Japanese in the 1670s, and draws attention and analyzes its appeal to natural law. While the natural law argument in Charles’s letter was commonplace and typically adduced in the context of criticizing trade-limiting policies, the article shows that it can also be seen as an acceptance of Japan’s Sakoku policy.