Sakoku (1633-1853): How Japan Closed Itself to the World

Sakoku, meaning “closed country”, is the name given to the foreign-relations policy of Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate from the 1630s to the 1850s. A series of edicts issued between 1633 and 1639 banned Christianity, expelled the Portuguese, forbade Japanese from going abroad and confined European trade to a small Dutch post at Nagasaki. The policy shaped more than two centuries of Japanese history, yet Japan was never as completely sealed off as its popular image suggests.

Background: Christianity, trade and unification

Europeans first reached Japan in the 1540s. Portuguese merchants brought firearms and Chinese silk, and Jesuit missionaries, beginning with Francis Xavier in 1549, made hundreds of thousands of converts, including several powerful lords in Kyushu. Estimates for the number of Japanese Christians around 1600 range from about 200,000 to 300,000 or more.

Japan’s unifiers grew suspicious of this movement. Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued an order expelling missionaries in 1587 and had 26 Christians crucified at Nagasaki in 1597. Tokugawa Ieyasu, who founded the shogunate in 1603, at first encouraged foreign trade, but in 1614 he banned Christianity throughout Japan and expelled the missionaries.

The rulers feared that Christian loyalty to a foreign religion could undermine obedience to the shogun, and they knew of Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the Americas and Asia. They also wanted to make sure that foreign trade, especially the lucrative silk trade, enriched the shogunate rather than independent lords in the south-west.

The edicts of the 1630s

Under the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, a series of orders addressed to the commissioners of Nagasaki tightened control step by step.

• 1633: only ships carrying a special licence from the shogun’s senior councillors could sail abroad, and Japanese who had lived overseas for more than five years were forbidden to return.
• 1635: all Japanese ships were banned from foreign voyages, and any Japanese person returning from abroad faced death. Chinese ships were limited to Nagasaki.
• 1636: children of Portuguese fathers and their Japanese mothers were deported to Macau, and the Portuguese were confined to Dejima, a new artificial island in Nagasaki harbour.
• 1639: after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638, Portuguese ships were banned from Japan altogether.

The ban was enforced brutally. When Macau sent an embassy in 1640 to ask for the resumption of trade, the shogunate executed most of its members, with 61 put to death and a handful of crew sent back to report what had happened. In 1641 the Dutch East India Company, which had not tried to spread Christianity, was moved from Hirado to Dejima, where it remained under close supervision.

Enforcing the ban on Christianity

Inside Japan the shogunate built a system to root out Christianity. Every household had to register with a Buddhist temple, which certified that its members were not Christians. In some areas, especially around Nagasaki, suspects were made to step on a fumie, a bronze or wooden image of Christ or the Virgin Mary, to prove they had renounced the faith.

Missionaries who entered secretly were hunted down, and thousands of Japanese Christians were executed or died under torture in the 1620s and 1630s. Some communities survived in secret for more than two centuries as Kakure Kirishitan, “hidden Christians”, passing down prayers and rites orally.

The four gateways: how closed was Japan?

Modern historians, notably Ronald Toby, have shown that Japan kept regular foreign relations through four controlled channels, sometimes called the “four gateways”.

• Nagasaki: Dutch merchants on Dejima and Chinese merchants, who from 1689 lived in a walled Chinese quarter. Chinese trade was larger than Dutch trade throughout the period.
• Tsushima: the Sō family managed trade and diplomacy with Joseon Korea, through a Japanese trading house in Busan. Korean embassies visited Japan twelve times between 1607 and 1811; all but the last, which was received on Tsushima, travelled to Edo.
• Satsuma: the Shimazu lords, who had invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1609, controlled its trade, and Ryukyuan missions travelled to Edo.
• Matsumae: the Matsumae family in southern Hokkaido traded with the Ainu people, and through them with mainland north-east Asia.

Some historians therefore prefer terms such as “maritime restrictions” (kaikin) to “closed country”. The shogunate was not rejecting the outside world but controlling it, much as Ming China had done with its own sea ban.

Knowledge also flowed in. The Dutch had to deliver annual reports on world events, and their chief made regular journeys to Edo to pay respects to the shogun. In 1720 the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune relaxed the ban on Western books that did not concern Christianity, which encouraged rangaku, “Dutch learning”, in medicine, astronomy and other sciences.

Life under the policy

The restrictions coincided with a long period of internal peace. Japan’s population grew to around 30 million by the early 18th century, cities such as Edo, Osaka and Kyoto flourished, and a rich urban culture of kabuki, woodblock printing and popular literature emerged.

Foreign trade remained important but was increasingly limited. Japan exported large amounts of silver and later copper, and the shogunate repeatedly capped trade to stop the outflow of metals. Under regulations drawn up by the scholar-official Arai Hakuseki in 1715, Chinese ships were limited to 30 a year and Dutch ships to two.

Japanese communities that had grown up in Southeast Asian ports, such as Ayutthaya in Siam and Hoi An in Vietnam, were cut off from home and gradually disappeared as their members married into local society.

Pressure from outside and the end of sakoku

From the late 18th century, Western ships appeared more often. Russian envoys arrived in 1792 and 1804 seeking trade and were turned away. In 1808 the British warship HMS Phaeton entered Nagasaki harbour in pursuit of Dutch ships, and in 1825 the shogunate ordered that foreign ships approaching the coast be driven off by force.

News of China’s defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839–1842) alarmed the shogunate, which in 1842 softened its order to allow foreign ships to receive water and fuel. American whalers and traders in the Pacific increasingly wanted safe harbours and coal.

On 8 July 1853 Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy entered Edo Bay with four ships and delivered a letter demanding the opening of Japan. He returned with a larger squadron in 1854, and on 31 March 1854 the shogunate signed the Treaty of Kanagawa, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate. Similar agreements with Britain, Russia and the Netherlands followed, and the commercial treaties of 1858 opened Japan to regular foreign trade.

The end of sakoku destabilised the shogunate, which was blamed for yielding to foreign demands. Within fifteen years of Perry’s arrival the Tokugawa regime had fallen, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 launched rapid modernisation. The memory of the closed country still colours debates in Japan about openness, immigration and national identity.

Key people

• Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616): founder of the shogunate, who first welcomed European traders, including the Englishman William Adams, but banned Christianity in 1614.
• Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651): the third shogun, under whom the main edicts were issued. He also tightened control over the great lords through the system of alternate attendance in Edo.
• Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751): the eighth shogun, a practical reformer whose easing of the book ban opened the way for Dutch learning.
• Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716): a German physician who served the Dutch on Dejima and wrote one of the most influential European descriptions of Japan, published in English in 1727.
• Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858): the American naval officer whose expedition of 1853–1854 forced the shogunate to abandon the policy.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: Japan had no contact with the outside world. In fact it traded with China, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom, the Ainu and the Dutch throughout the period, and its scholars studied Western books.

Myth: the Tokugawa called their policy sakoku. The word was invented in 1801 by the interpreter Shizuki Tadao, translating an essay by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer, who had lived on Dejima in 1690–1692. It became the standard label only in the 19th century.

Myth: Japan’s isolation kept it technologically frozen. Japan did fall behind industrialising Western nations, but Dutch learning had already spread Western anatomy, astronomy and gunnery among a small educated class, which helped Japan modernise rapidly after 1868.

Timeline

• 1614: Tokugawa Ieyasu bans Christianity and expels missionaries.
• 1633: The first of Iemitsu’s edicts restricts overseas voyages.
• 1635: All Japanese overseas voyages are banned on pain of death.
• 1636: The Portuguese are confined to the new island of Dejima.
• 1637–1638: The Shimabara Rebellion in Kyushu.
• 1639: Portuguese ships are banned from Japan.
• 1641: The Dutch are moved from Hirado to Dejima.
• 1720: Yoshimune relaxes the ban on non-religious Western books.
• 1853, 8 July: Commodore Perry’s squadron arrives in Edo Bay.
• 1854, 31 March: The Treaty of Kanagawa opens two ports to American ships.

Why it matters

Sakoku defined Japan’s relationship with the world for more than two centuries, protecting the Tokugawa order while keeping a narrow window open to foreign knowledge. Understanding how limited, rather than total, the isolation was helps explain both Japan’s long domestic peace and its remarkably fast transformation after 1853.