Rejection of Outdated Western Narratives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.