The Man Who Warned Too Early: Shihei Hayashi, Dejima and Japan Before the Black Ships

Long before the Black Ships ever darkened the coast, there was a thinker who foresaw the approaching storm and urged swift, radical countermeasures: Shihei Hayashi (1738–1793).

In truth, however, the root cause lay in the shogunate’s sheer lack of strategic preparedness for the outside world.

Rare for his day, Shihei was a lifelong traveler who journeyed to the furthest reaches of the Japanese archipelago.

Yet his travels were dedicated to something far deeper than merely expanding his horizons. They were devoted to a single overriding purpose: formulating a doctrine of national defense.

Shihei Hayashi traveled to Nagasaki in 1767 and again in 1769, engaging directly with Chinese and Dutch traders, and in 1772 he explored Hokkaido (then Ezo), the frontline of Russia’s southward push.

In 1785, Shihei published Sangoku Tsuran Zusetsu (三国通覧図説, An Illustrated Survey of Three Countries). Accompanied by detailed maps and illustrations, the work introduced the geography, customs, and peoples of the Korean peninsula, the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern Okinawa), and Ezo, urging the shogunate to understand these borderlands and govern them strategically as bastions of maritime defense.

Left with no other recourse, Shihei abandoned appeals to government officials and turned toward writing for kindred spirits who might yet exist somewhere in the realm. The culmination of his life’s work was Kaikoku Heidan (海国兵談, A Discussion of the Military Defense of a Maritime Nation), published in 1791. Because every publisher, terrified of political repercussions, refused to touch it, Shihei went into debt to publish it himself. Under these constrained circumstances, the print run of this revolutionary work was a mere thirty copies.

Entangled with this crisis, Shihei’s visionary book—penned purely out of devotion to the nation’s survival—was branded a seditious attack on the shogunate. In 1792, Kaikoku Heidan was banned, its printing blocks confiscated, and Shihei was sentenced to strict house arrest. Broken by persecution, he died the following year, in 1793.

This took place sixty years before Perry’s Black Ships entered Uraga Bay—a stark testament to how thoroughly dysfunctional the Tokugawa regime had already become.

The document warned that Russia harbored imminent ambitions to invade Japan. Transmitted by the Dutch to the shogunate, the warning was promptly buried by officials, who chose to ignore it while ensuring that no word of it leaked to the public.

Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the historical truth emerge: Russia had no intention of conquering Japan at the time, harboring little interest in the islands. St.

Confronted with the stark reality of foreign pressure, what did the shogunate do instead of allocating its budget to military defense? It commanded shrines and temples to offer ceaseless prayers. It sought, in all seriousness, to resolve this geopolitical crisis through incantation alone. This staggering folly stands as undeniable proof that the shogunate had already ceased to function as a government.

Nariaki Tokugawa (1800–1860), lord of the Mito domain, laid bare the pathetic state of the regime in a letter:

"The shogunate has reached the point of handing over funds to Kaneiji in Ueno, throwing itself upon the mercy of Buddhist protection.

This event was seized upon to revive the regime's lost authority, later disseminated politically as the legend of the kamikaze (神風), the divine wind. Fascinatingly, recent underwater archaeological surveys have uncovered mounting physical evidence that a catastrophic storm genuinely did wreck the Mongol fleet. The legend, in other words, was historically true.

Yet at the end of the Edo period, no divine wind returned to save the regime.

Whenever a new era begins in Japan—and not merely at the close of the Edo period—a recurring pattern reveals itself: the authorities ignore the forward-looking warnings of sensible minds, choosing instead to put off confronting the problem.

Time and again at crucial turning points in Japanese history, rulers who neglected every preparation have fallen into panic when crisis struck, unable to devise a single rational countermeasure and retreating into the delusion of prayer. That was precisely what unfolded in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Yet the shogunate had prepared nothing. Even had it wished to maintain seclusion, Japan possessed no military force capable of repelling the Black Ships.

Modern historians often treat the arrival of the Black Ships as the true starting point of the Meiji Restoration—the military coup that established modern government—but this reading is mistaken. The plain truth is that the shogunate simply refused to heed the warnings of visionary minds, failing to make the slightest military preparation. If we trace the foresight back to Shihei Hayashi, his warnings had simply become reality sixty years later.

As I have noted before, Perry’s arrival was not an unforeseen bolt from the blue; a discerning minority of Japanese thinkers had predicted this crisis decades in advance. The culpability lay with the rulers who refused to listen.

Though Shihei Hayashi was dismissed and persecuted in his lifetime, his spirit was inherited by the generations that followed, serving as the paramount intellectual catalyst that propelled Japan into the modern era.

Because the shogunate forbade the Dutch on Dejima from bringing wives or families, an exception was made to prevent friction with the local population: only yujo (遊女), or courtesans, were permitted to enter the island. These women came primarily from the nearby Maruyama pleasure quarter, and they were the only people during the sakoku era who could move freely between Dejima and the outside world. In doing so, they carried the culture, items, and intelligence they encountered back into Japanese society, making them figures of exceptional importance. Yet because they were courtesans, cast to the margins of society, their contributions were long ignored by serious historical inquiry.