The Edo Closed Country and Dejima

Also called: Sakoku, Closed country policy

To keep out Christianity the Edo shogunate forbade Japanese to go abroad, expelled Portuguese ships in 1639 and in 1641 moved the Dutch trading post to Dejima in Nagasaki, confining trade with the West to that island.

At first the Edo shogunate traded actively with Southeast Asia through “red-seal ships” licensed to sail abroad. But wary of the spread of Christianity and of western daimyo growing rich on trade, in the 1630s it forbade Japanese ships to go abroad and Japanese overseas to return. After the Shimabara Rebellion it barred Portuguese ships in 1639, and in 1641 it moved the Dutch trading post from Hirado to Dejima, an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour. These controls on foreign contact were later called sakoku, the “closed country”.

Japan was not entirely sealed off. There were “four windows”: Nagasaki for the Dutch and Chinese, Tsushima for Korea, Satsuma for Ryukyu and Matsumae for the Ainu. The Dutch factor presented the shogunate with reports of world news (fūsetsugaki), and the books and medicine that came in through Dejima laid the ground for eighteenth-century Dutch learning. Hendrick Hamel and his shipmates, wrecked on Jeju in 1653, were Dutch East India Company men bound for Dejima. The closed country ended with the US–Japan Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854.