THE JAPANESE hadn’t always been cut off from the rest of the world. Before they shut their doors in the seventeenth century they traded with foreign countries. China, Korea, Cambodia, Siam, and even the distant Philippine Islands were visited by Japanese trading ships. Japan also welcomed ships from Europe.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to land in Japan—Cipango, the fabulous country that Columbus had hoped to reach. They arrived in 1542, when one of their ships was driven off course by strong winds. The Japanese welcomed the Portuguese, especially because they supplied guns.
In 1549 Christianity was introduced by the Portuguese Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier. Spanish friars soon followed and set up missions. As a result, thousands of Japanese were converted.
In 1600 the first Englishman reached Japan. He was Will Adams, the pilot of a Dutch ship that landed in Japan with only twenty-four survivors out of a crew over a hundred. Because of Adams’s knowledge about the outside world, Shogun Ieyasu declared that he was too valuable to be allowed to return to England. He became the Shogun’s interpreter, tutor, chief shipbuilder, and adviser. The Shogun made him a samurai and arranged for him to have a Japanese wife. (You may be familiar with Adams’s story. He was the hero, Blackthorne, in James Clavell’s novel, Shogun, which was dramatized on television.)
Adams made a point of telling the Shogun about the conquests of England’s enemies, Spain and Portugal. He spoke about Spain’s invasion of America and the Philippines, and Portugal’s seizure of the East Indies. Shogun Ieyasu had always suspected that Spanish and Portuguese missionaries were advance agents plotting aggression, and his new English adviser was eager to confirm his suspicions. In 1614 Ieyasu expelled all foreign priests and missionaries.
After Shogun Ieyasu died in 1616, Christianity was banned on penalty of death. Ghastly persecutions of Christians followed. Stamping on the cross became an annual ceremony. Even during the nineteenth century, Dutch merchants, castaways, and Japanese families who had once been converted were forced to trample upon holy Christian symbols. Those who refused were killed.
The English and Dutch were permitted to trade. They were tolerated because they were not “selling” religion. In 1623 the English stopped doing business with Japan because it was not profitable. Only the Dutch were left. By 1641 the Japanese had confined them to Deshima, the small trading post in Nagasaki harbor described in Chapter 5.
To insure isolation, a series of laws decreed:
· No Japanese could go abroad.
· No shipwrecked Japanese could return home from abroad.
· No foreigners would be tolerated.
· No large ships could be built. Only small boats could be constructed, conforming to a specified design that made them incapable of long voyages.
Sealed against foreign contacts, the general public knew nothing about the existence of the United States. They had never heard about the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. They hadn’t even seen pictures of steam engines, railroads, telegraphs, and modern firearms. Only select scholars and statesmen knew about events and advances that took place in Europe and America.1
Americans and Europeans didn’t know very much about Japan. Many thought that it was an obscure Pacific island inhabited by backward, barbarous people.
Gathering information about Japan had been an important part of Commodore Perry’s preparations. Before leaving the United States he traveled to upper New York State, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., collecting books and interviewing people. He asked whaling captains about the offshore waters of Japan, and he interviewed seamen who had been shipwrecked and imprisoned by the Japanese. The Dutch helped Perry. They supplied maps of Japan by handing them to the American minister to the Netherlands. But Perry never learned about Japan’s political organization.
Like all officials of the United States government he thought that “emperor” and “shogun” meant the same person. And although he became familiar with some aspects of their society, he did not understand their culture and unique social structure.