Rejection of Outdated Western Narratives

An Examination of How Western Historical Views on Japan Remain Crude

‘The Edo period was about 200 years of national isolation, and suddenly with the arrival of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships a shocking new era began.’ This story, commonly circulated and told, is in fact an entirely unreliable new theory fabricated after the Meiji period.

The fabricators of this story were officials of Choshu domain who became the core of the new Meiji government. The essence of their overthrow of the shogunate—the Meiji Restoration—was a military coup, and in the end it was nothing more than a shallow transfer of hegemony from the Tokugawa shogunate to Choshu officials. In essence, no genuine systemic transformation occurred; rather, the advanced governance system formed during the Edo period was preserved, and what drove the so-called new era was deception that merely disguised this continuity.

Therefore, they needed to perform for the public that they were entirely different from the Tokugawa shogunate, and in their scheme to utterly deny them they carried out what in modern terms would be called “national branding,” equating “Edo period = Sakoku (鎖国, closed country)” and “Meiji period = Kaikoku (開国, open country).” This was necessary because the Meiji government had been established by a military coup, and they had to thoroughly conceal that fact in order to preserve their system.

However, as I thoroughly scrutinize Japan through the lens of ancient maritime history, I can see clearly how crude those political motives were and how this was nothing more than sophistry convenient for Choshu officials. First, the so-called Sakoku of the Edo period originated mainly as a reaction to the arrogant acts of invasion carried out under the pretext of Portuguese Christian missionary activity, which was naturally a justified measure. In other words, Sakoku was a “NO” to their attempt to spread an unrelated religion in Japan at will and bring Japan under Portuguese control. Since that was its essence, the Western historical impression of Sakoku is gravely mistaken and needs to be corrected.

In fact, even today films are still made about so-called Christian persecution, continuing this image strategy, but for the samurai of the time those covert operations were intolerable and naturally had to be dealt with. They had no connection to Japan, no reason to practice that faith, yet they brought it in and spread it with invasion in mind—so it is only natural that measures were taken—and I cannot understand why this is still sensationalized. Looking at present-day Western nations makes this clear: in the spread of Islam similar things occur. The handling differs by era, but the nature is the same.

Moreover, overall discussions still tend to romanticize the Sakoku system excessively. Hayashi Shihei (1738–1793), after conducting on-site surveys, argued long before the arrival of the Black Ships that Japan’s maritime defenses were riddled with gaps, and it is pure fantasy to imagine that in those blank areas Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, or northern peoples who had long visited Japan did not continue to travel back and forth. In reality, the shogunate suppressed such matters for regime maintenance, so it is natural that the full picture rarely appears in historical records. We must consider this, but just as in the 8th–10th centuries missions from Balhae (渤海国) repeatedly came to the Japan Sea coast, and Japanese missions also visited Balhae, such ancient maritime routes were entirely unrelated to the later notion of Sakoku. Because the West had no geographic ties to Japan, they naturally knew nothing of these countless routes; they simply lacked the ability. Thus Sakoku was in effect a measure aimed at certain Western countries, particularly Portugal, and it is more natural to assume that the flows of people, goods, and information with those historically trading with Japan’s islands continued undisturbed. The limited nature of Edo’s Sakoku becomes clear from Japanese figures such as Hayashi Shihei and Takayama Hikokuro (1747–1793), who traveled widely across Japan and proposed farsighted perspectives.