鎖国という誤認The Misconception of Isolation

“The Edo period was about 200 years of national isolation, and suddenly the arrival of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships opened a startling new era.” This story, commonly told, is in fact a view shaped after the Meiji period, and it cannot be accepted as it stands.

Behind the shaping of this story lie the political dynamics centered on people from the Choshu domain, who became the core of the new Meiji government. The essence of the overthrow of the shogunate, the Meiji Restoration, was a military change of government, and in the end it was largely a transfer of the initiative held by the Tokugawa shogunate to the new government. The advanced governance system formed during the Edo period was carried over intact, and the story that impressed a new era upon people was what drove and supported the new order.

For that reason, the new government needed to show the public that it was different from the Tokugawa regime, and what in modern terms would be called national branding was carried out: “Edo period = sakoku (鎖国, closed country)” and “Meiji period = kaikoku (開国, open country).” Because the Meiji government had been established by a military change of government, it needed to place that starting point inside a story and so stabilize its order.

Yet when I look at Japan through the lens of ancient maritime history, I can see clearly that this framing was a simplification born of political need. First, the source of the Edo-period sakoku lay mainly in a response to the tensions over trade and territory bound up with Portuguese Christian missionary activity, a measure the government of the time chose in order to protect its own rule. In other words, sakoku was a judgment about the autonomy of the country: how to face a religion brought in from outside and the political and economic influence that came with it. Seen in that light, the impression of a “closed country” is a great simplification.

The response to the Christians, too, is preceded by an image repeated in film and elsewhere, but for the samurai of the time it was a grave matter that could decide the order of the realm. In a world where faith, politics, and trade were intertwined, there are many cases across history, in different eras and regions, of authorities responding in similar ways. What this shows is not the good or evil of any one party but the universality of the dynamics that arise when different worlds collide.

Moreover, discussions overall still romanticize the sakoku system too much. Shihei Hayashi (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 strains belief that in those blank areas there was no traffic with the Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, and northern peoples who had long come to Japan. In reality, the shogunate kept such matters out of view to maintain its order, so it is natural that the full picture rarely appears in historical records. Just as missions from Balhae (渤海国) repeatedly came to the Sea of Japan coast between the eighth and tenth centuries, and Japanese missions repeatedly went there too, these old maritime routes never ceased during the sakoku era. Sakoku was in effect a system concerning relations with certain countries, Portugal among them, and it is more natural to think that the movements of people who had traded by sea with Japan’s islands since ancient times continued to flow, in terms of people, goods, and information. The limits of the Edo shogunate’s sakoku are plain from the movements of figures such as Shihei Hayashi and Hikokuro Takayama (1747–1793), who traveled across Japan and proposed farsighted perspectives.

Furthermore, I personally position the arrival of the Black Ships in 1853 as the most belated event. Before that, the historical fact that Russian moves were already unsettling the Edo shogunate tends to be overlooked. Shihei Hayashi warned the shogunate, the domains, and the court that Japan’s maritime defense was hollow, but no one took it up. In this context appeared Kunpei Gamo (1768–1813), strongly influenced by Hayashi and Takayama and later a pioneer of kofun studies. Amid a climate in which Hayashi’s proposals went unheeded, what exposed that the shogunate’s defenses were not reaching far enough, long before the Black Ships, was Russian activity toward Hokkaido. Gamo consistently argued for strengthening coastal defense, and so that it would not remain mere desk-bound theory he built on Hayashi’s proposals: rebuild finances, strengthen the navy, construct warships, and widen the military role that had been limited to the samurai. This had already begun well before 1853, and the greater influence came from the movements in the north.

By the time of the Black Ships, then, awareness of coastal defense had already risen in many quarters through tension with the north. In this climate the influence of those who thought of Japan’s future, from Hayashi and Takayama through Gamo, took root and was deeply sharpened in the Mito domain, which from the early Edo period had played a strong ideological role. The thought of Mito, beginning with Yukoku Fujita (1774–1836), Toko Fujita (1806–1855), and Seishisai Aizawa (1782–1868), strongly inspired young men from other domains, and many traveled to study there. Emerging by way of Mito were Shoin Yoshida (1830–1859), leader of the Shoka Sonjuku academy of the Choshu domain, and Takamori Saigo (1828–1877), the man of character who gathered and led the passionate young men of Satsuma.

That is why the Dutch, who did not presuppose missionary work and sought economic ties, were granted permission by the shogunate to trade at Dejima in Nagasaki. The shogunate strictly restricted trade and movement with the West, but as noted, even in the era called sakoku it could not manage every movement across the whole archipelago, and without taking that into account the true picture of the age does not come into view. Accepting as it stands the fixed idea “Tokugawa shogunate = sakoku,” shaped in the Meiji era, hides this.

In the same way, the view “Edo period = feudalism” is also one story that spread through scholarship after the Meiji period. This becomes visible if one reads all the works of the economist Mizuo Otani, who studied this transitional era thoroughly after the war and left superb studies. The Edo period cannot be captured within the frame of feudalism, and rather than capitalism being brought with the Black Ships, Japan had already achieved within its own borders one of the world’s most advanced capitalist conditions. That is why Japan was able to move to a modern economy more smoothly than other countries.

This grew within Japan on its own, apart from outside influence, and the activity of merchants beginning in Sakai and later in Osaka’s Nakanoshima points directly to it. The view that Japan’s opening, capitalism, and industrialization were a light given from outside comes from a current formed where the story of bringing civilization from outside overlapped with the political dynamics of an order that wished to stabilize itself by negating the Edo period entirely. The reason this story remains widely shared today is that the Meiji regime continues in Japan, and its depth is evident in the way the modern bureaucracy, which inherited the Japanese Neo-Confucianism of the Edo period, has persisted so firmly.

So why do so many people still take this simplified view as their premise when discussing Japan? First, because chances to investigate Japan on foot are limited. In contrast, I always conduct fieldwork across Japan to clarify its multifaceted reality, and through this I deeply understand that Japan is not “an island nation closed by the sea” but “an island nation open to the sea” (while never forgetting its bidirectionality).

Thus, in the Black Ships story that rests on an established view, the Edo shogunate of the Tokugawa, the feudal overlords, had maintained strict isolation for about 200 years, and suddenly black ships arrived from afar, astonishing Japan and leading it to open. This logic is a savior narrative. It has its source in a view given from outside, that Japan is “an island nation closed by the sea.” From Japan’s side, whether Columbus discovered anything, or wherever Zipangu was, Japan had cultivated its own history and culture. In fact, many people around the world are still moved by Edo-period culture, and the Edo period stood at the most advanced cultural level in the world. Town planning in Edo and across the country was astonishingly sophisticated. That such a state could be seen as primitive shows at a glance how far off the premise was.

Beneath this view lies a one-way structure of discoverer and discovered. “An island nation closed by the sea” (Zipangu) was discovered, and through that encounter people in a primitive state became enlightened and escaped feudal oppression. This structure is one pattern that has been told about many places in the world, and I sometimes feel its residue in writing about Japan from an outside point of view.

This simple structure was then taken into the Meiji era and overlapped with the story that stabilized the new government. The interests of the two coincided (one of the intermediaries was Ryoma Sakamoto). The Meiji period was built while forming the membrane of a story: “from isolation to opening,” “from feudalism to enlightenment.” This was because the economic benefits, especially for the powers of the time, were large.

Consider that Choshu was located at the edge of Edo-period Japan, and its people lived in a way very different from the cultural spheres of cities such as Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. This in itself is ordinary in Japan, with no hierarchy, and this plurality is the essence of Japan, but it is true that they stood where longing and impatience toward the urban cultural spheres arose easily. Since the bearers of the Restoration were mostly lower-ranking samurai, their treatment as samurai had differed greatly throughout the Edo period. When one tries to change one’s position greatly, seeking backing outside Japan is a natural move, and because it was a different world from Japan, the West became for them a source of a new image (one that could be formed without presupposing China as before).

That is why Takamori Saigo of Satsuma, a hero who thought of Japan’s future, resisted so strongly the attitude of the Meiji government, which was being built on the backing of outside power. Seeking to overthrow the exhausted shogunate and to build a new nation for the people, Saigo drew countless passionate young men who loved his character. They gathered and rose up, and the Seinan War broke out in 1877. As a result, Saigo was driven to take his own life, and a system led by the Choshu side hardened under the name of the Meiji government. This fissure of 1877 led to the rise of the Meiji right wing, to the appearance of Mitsuru Toyama (1855–1944) of the Genyosha, who had been shaped by Saigo’s teaching, and, with Toyama at its center, to Asianism, proposed as a liberation movement through which the countries of Asia would stand up from colonial rule by the powers. Mitsuru Toyama was Saigo’s true successor.

“Datsu-A Ron” (脱亜論, 1885), whose author is unknown, is also much misunderstood. Its essence was a proposal to discard the frame of “Japan within Asia” as defined from outside. Asia as a frame is a definition from outside, and Japan, with its historical ties to neighboring China, the Korean Peninsula, Southeast Asia, and the north, cannot be lumped together in that way. Behind Datsu-A Ron lies a strong awareness that Asia as a single entity is an outline drawn from outside. Whether the author was Yukichi Fukuzawa hardly matters. Asianism, led by Toyama, turned this logic around: if Asia had been lumped together from outside, then each country should stand on its own against the rule being imposed there, and if that allowed Asian solidarity, it mattered for Japan too. This was Toyama’s Asianism (Greater Asianism), but commentators with little knowledge of Japanese history confuse it with the militarist Asianism of the army’s runaway years in the Showa era. They are entirely different.

Toyama urged the nations defined as “Asia” not to remain content under occupation but to stand up and achieve self-reliant liberation, saying that this is what human life is. Though not a politician, he supported Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese revolution, Subhas Chandra Bose of the Indian independence movement, Kim Ok-gyun and Park Young-hyo of Korea, and others, and through exchange he sent people to those countries to support their independence movements.

Yet after Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai (1855–1932), who supported the Genyosha led by Toyama, was assassinated, the Genyosha rapidly lost influence. After 1926, in the Showa era, the military’s voice grew too strong to ignore, the Kwantung Army’s actions surfaced as the Manchurian Incident in 1931, and the army, which tried to use this to make its power absolute, began to run out of control. At that time the activities of men such as Toyama and Ryohei Uchida, who acted from an essential perspective in Saigo’s lineage, became an obstacle for the army, and Inukai, close to Toyama, was assassinated in 1932. To break trust in Toyama, his Asianism was rewritten, and a course began of transplanting the imperialist structures of the powers onto the countries of Asia as they were. We must not overlook this flow. As a result, the “Asia” defined from outside became the worst form, in which the ruler simply shifted from the powers to Japan, and international relations moved at once toward tension. With no one able to say anything to the runaway army, Japan was driven into a war with the United States in which its chances were slim in national strength, economic strength, and military strength. The outcome is the Japanese regime of today, centered on its relationship with the United States.

An overview of this flow shows that what differs greatly between the twentieth century and now is that, when discussing other countries and regions, analysis centered on the side with the louder voice no longer holds. The attitude that each speaks of its own country seems fitting for our time, and now that language barriers have been removed by AI, the simplifications in how countries were described from outside are being reviewed one after another, and we have entered an age in which the voices of those concerned meet head-on. In this sense it can be called a pluralistic world, or rather a liquid one, and this applies not only to the West and the rest but to Japan itself. Even before the war, when Tokyo scholars discussed Ryukyu, the Okinawan folklorist Fuyu Iha raised strong questions and published one outstanding study of Ryukyu after another, and when Tokyo scholars spoke of the Ainu, the Ainu linguist Mashiho Chiri published outstanding studies of the Ainu one after another. I place the point at which the single definition of “Japan/Japanese” was established after the defeat of the student movement in the 1960s, so I take it that before that the plural world was the essence. The problem here is language.

English, the world’s standard language, belongs to a subject-centered linguistic realm, and Japanese to a predicate-centered one, so they are different realms and the way of understanding turns around.

Now, in 2025, I think the West and Japan have entered an age in which they can regard each other as places among places, on equal footing, and speak together after setting foot in the field. Texts about Japan are written in great numbers every day, but their depth begins with each side thoroughly investigating its own ground. Only an understanding grounded in thorough investigation of one’s own country opens the way to understanding another.