In Our Time - Japan's Sakoku Period

Episode Date: April 4, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Japan's Sakoku period, two centuries when the country deliberately isolated itself from the Western world. Sakoku began with a series of edicts in the 1630s which restricted the rights of Japanese to leave their country and expelled most of the Europeans living there. For the next two hundred years, Dutch traders were the only Westerners free to live in Japan. It was not until 1858 and the gunboat diplomacy of the American Commodore Matthew Perry that Japan's international isolation finally ended. Although historians used to think of Japan as completely isolated from external influence during this period, recent scholarship suggests that Japanese society was far less isolated from European ideas during this period than previously thought.With:Richard Bowring Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of CambridgeAndrew Cobbing Associate Professor of History at the University of NottinghamRebekah Clements Research Fellow of Queens' College and Research Associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1797, contains a long article about Japan, which states, quote, The natives are prohibited from going out of their country, and all foreigners are excluded from an open and free.

betrayed. The Dutch and Chinese are shut up whilst they remain there, and the most strict watch is set upon them, insomuch that they are no better than prisoners. And when these words were first published, Japan had been effectively closed to foreigners for more than 150 years. In the early 17th century, the country's rulers began a policy known as Sarkoku, under which Westerners were banned from entering Japan, while the country's own people weren't allowed to leave. This period of self-imposed isolation continued for over two centuries until the arrival of an American Navy ship in 1854. Sarkoku had a major consequences for Japanese society in who where the country had been perceived both at home

and abroad. With me, to discuss Japan's Sarkoku period are Richard Bowering, Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge, Andrew Cobbing, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham, and Rebecca Clements, research fellow of Queen's College and Research Associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. Richard Bowering, at the start of the 17th century, Japan was emerging from a turbulent period in its history. What was that?

Well, the change at the end of this, that particular century, was one from chaos to peace, from chaos to what is known as Pax Tokugawa. Chaos being the 16th century. Indeed. And just to put a little bit of explanation on that, essentially we have a period of warring warlords, no one in full control.

People were ready, I think, for a movement towards some kind of centralisation. And at the end of that 16th century, we have what are known as the three unifiers. and gradually they begin to get hegemonic power and of course the last person to do this was Tokugawa Ieyasu essentially in 60 hundred. Three people, absolutely.

Now, if I can say something about the middle person, his name is Hideyoshi. And this gives you some idea of how Japan fits in to the rest of the area in the Far East. In 1598, Hideoshi decided, sorry, not 92, he decided to, he wanted to be emperor of China. And, of course, the way you get to China is to go through Korea. And he invaded Korea. It was a kind of blitzkrieg.

It took about a month to get to the Yalu River, which is the break between Korea and China. The Ming dynasty at the time then decided no, well, this was not a good idea and they stopped them. He tried again later on. It all came to a very bad end in 1598 when, of course, he died and the Japanese had to come away from the peninsula. But you can see that the relations between China and between Japan and Korea and China are going to be pretty difficult at the beginning of this period. And then the first Tokugawa, a shogun, shogun being a military leader, came in just after 1600. They took power. When they grabbed it, what did they do about it?

He had the problem of setting up, and of course the state did last for 250 years, he had the problem of what to deal with the people that he had. He called it, the Great Peace, didn't it? It was called. It was called, the Great Peace. Yes. And people believed that because of the problems that they had. before, of course. I mean, everyone really did look forward to a lack of chaos. He had about

250, 260 domains to deal with. Some of the ones that he had, these are local lords, some of the ones who had been against him, he didn't depose them, but what he needed to do was to place friends around them so that he could isolate them. And a lot of these, of course, are actually in the West, and the West of Japan is the closest to the continent. And this is going to become more important as our discussion continues because they are the people in control of trade with China and Korea. Tell any way you look at it, it's a remarkable act.

You have these warring states going up for 100 years. You've talked about that particular warlord who sent to 150,000 men to China, five times bigger than the Spanish Armada, didn't work, collapse when he came back. And this man comes in and the shogunate establishes authority quite quickly. Yes, it does. And away we go. Rebecca Clemens, which Western powers were involved in Japan at that date? And what were they doing?

Well, from the late 15th through the early 16th century, sorry, the late 16th through to the early 17th century, basically there were Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English. And if I could just talk a little bit about the context to this, they came initially seeking trade, and they plugged into a network that had been established by Ming traders, Chinese junks going out to different parts of Southeast Asia,

establishing shipping lanes and ports for trading. And later on, Japanese traders and then the European traders came into this network. and the Portuguese were the first to arrive. And they came along looking for Japanese silver. They brought silk. So what they would do is they would come from Europe with a cargo of European cloth, cut glass, crystal, flemish clocks, novelty items, things like that,

and they would trade them for different stuff in Southeast Asia, and then they would go on to Japan and sell some of their goods that they had brought from Europe but also silk. And then they were followed by Jesuit missionaries who came in search of souls. And there were also later Spanish and Spanish Dominicans and Franciscan friars towards the end of the 16th century. Two of the things you said in that are going to be very strong for the story. The Japanese silver mines were an extremely powerful trading arm for them whenever they needed.

It's a big money-moneymaker in every sense of it. And secondly, religion comes in, which, as far as to be a very powerful, Tukukawa is concerned, they become the enemy. And we have one of the first Jesuits, Zavier comes in Portuguese, comes in that time. Can you tell us, when the Christians came, Zaviers say they converted 300,000 people. Yes. In your note, you all say it's an exaggeration, but there's still a feeling that a lot of people are turning Christian. What were they turning Christian from?

What was the religion they were being weaned from or tempted from? Well, I mean, there's not necessarily one religion the way perhaps we would think about it. So indigenous Japanese religions were animist and the religion of Shinto that some of your listeners might have heard of, which Press Barring can perhaps tell us more about. You can't just more about it a few years ago. Yes, was not sort of codified as a religion until much, much later. So there were local shrines and these kinds of beliefs. And there was also Buddhism, different sects of Buddhism.

And so Japanese people would have been, to some extent, practitioners of both. But we are talking at the beginning of the century of a serious settlement of Christianity, sometimes on the far-off-long islands and such. But it was a force there, and most important, as far as the new regime concerned, they owed allegiance to a foreign power. Well, a power that was higher in authority in their worldview than, and the shogun, yes. But actually Hideoshi, who we've spoken about,

he was also quite suspicious of Buddhism as well for this reason, this idea of an otherworldly source of power, so not a secular source of power, a source of power other than him. So he was equally concerned about Buddhism as well as Christianity. It wasn't just Christianity that he was concerned about. So did the new shogunate have a view of Christianity from the very beginning, or did it grow as they felt opposition coming from it? Well, I think they inherited this suspicion of the potential of Christianity to cause conflicting loyalties.

But they didn't, initially they were quite conciliatory towards Christianity. Some of the Daimyo who had helped in the Power Alliance that brought... These are the pieces that Drashua... Yes, who had brought Tokugawa... So the warlords who had helped bring Tokugawa Ie Yasu to power, some of them had been Christians. So initially there wasn't a huge amount of resistance. but over time this grew. Andrew Coving, is there any one reason or a handy cluster of reasons

why the Shoggins, the Shogun had began to pursue a policy of international isolation in the early in the 17th century? Well, like any new, strong state, they wanted to exercise control. And as Richard said, we are coming out of a period of anarchy, really. they're trying to impose order onto that and as far as trade is concerned they're trying to control as much of the trade as they can. The Tokugawa power base is in the east of the country.

Around Edo which became Tokyo. Around Edo which is now the capital city in Tokyo. Most of the trade, the overseas trade, was coming into Japan from the west where there were quite a few potentially rebellious daimyo warlords. So it was paramount for the Tokugawa shogunate, even though they were based in the east, to exert control over the trade. And that's why Nagasaki, which by this time they had taken Nagasaki away from Jesuit control, this was centrally controlled. There was a centrally appointed magistrate controlling the port of Nagasaki.

And so as far as possible, they wanted to monopolize the revenue and all the information that was coming from overseas. and that's why they concentrated the trade as much as possible through that designated gateway. So this happened quite early. They decided to do that. They designated Nagasaki, which was quite small, but they built it up as the only place that, of course there were pirates, but the only place that trade could come through officially from other countries.

And they would control it. Yes, it took a few decades. I'm sure it did, but this is what they said out to do. The process to crystallize, yes. from quite early on in the early 1600s already they tried to impose a monopoly on the silk imports coming through Nagasaki they made sure that they could control the revenue from that

over time they made sure that the foreign ships the Dutch ships they were operating through a nearby island called Hiradul English ships were also operating out of Hiradul which is close to Nagasaki. The English left of their own accord, but over time they gradually concentrated all the foreign ships,

the Dutch ships and the Chinese ships into Nagasaki is the only recognised gateway for that trade. Silk has been mentioned two or three times. Rebecca mentioned silk, and you've now mentioned silk, there have been a close connection between China and Japan. Japan up to that time, there's a junior figure rather in awe of China, copying different Chinese systems,

the leading scholars could read classical Chinese, etc., etc. Were they in a special case still there? Well, the cultural legacy to China goes back a millennium before that, I mean Buddhism, which has been mentioned, and Chinese writing, the whole system of writing, this came through China, from China to Japan in the very first place. So the tribute system was really the system of international relations in East Asia at the time. And according to that tribute system, China as the Middle Kingdom was always at the top.

And Japan, through the ages, at different stages, had actually paid tribute to China over the last previous 1,000 years. But as Richard mentioned as well, Japan was starting to try and pull away from subservience to China. This happened quite spectacularly in the 13th century, actually, when the Mongols, having conquered China, tried to invade Japan and the Japanese resisted. After that, a previous shogunate actually did buy into the tribute system, and they organized trade relations through that. But with the new shogunate, they did put out diplomatic feelers to China. They considered having some kind of trade relations with them. But when the Chinese insisted on Japan being subservient, this is when the new Tokugawa Shogun.

It really pulled away and decided to set up its own parallel diplomatic system and make sure that it was as independent of China as it could be. Richard, Richard Boring, the two things now. Can you just tell us how specifically they identify, identified Christianity, the Christians, as an enemy, and how useful it was for them to have that enemy? How useful it was to have them. Well, it's always useful to have an enemy if you want to build a central state, isn't it? Absolutely. It's very useful to have. I suppose if we come back to the fact that partly it's the fact, yes, that Christians owe allegiance to something other than the secular authority.

but I think the most important thing here is that, and we've mentioned this word daimior, the local lords, it was the dangerous, as far as you were seeing from the centre, it was the dangerous local lords who were actually interested in Christianity. Why were they interested in Christianity? Because that's how they could get guns. That's how they could get, it was through trade, it was through the Portuguese, that they could actually,

obtain the kind of material that the centre didn't want them to have. And therefore, getting rid of Christianity, let's say, in the 1630s, which is when it really happens, is an attempt from the centre to stop the people on the periphery, allowing to stop them having more and more trade? You mentioned the 1630s. That's at the time, as I understand, when there were a number of decrees at edicts put out. That is when the idea of isolation got going,

that Shogunate had been there for, let us say, about 30 years by then. Who knows how long they thought they were going to be there. They were there for another 200 years. But they put in place some edict. Should you briskly run us through those edicts? What they said then? Andrew has a list of the edicts, I think, in which we, if anybody's really interested in those, in those, there's about five, five, I think.

You can have in between, I don't mind. I share it. I'll just say something in the beginning. These edicts are usually very short. They're the kind of all Padres will be got rid of. And if anybody is in charge of them or harboring them, they will be killed, that sort of thing. We have, there are five what they're called seclusion decrees. John Andrews will come in here. I'll let Andrews, yes.

Well, yes, between 1633 and 1639, a whole series of decrees. Outbound ships are banned in 1633 and two years later. All the Japanese people who are abroad in the so-called Japan towns all across Southeast Asia and beyond. In fact, as far as Thailand was the furthest one. They were banned, prohibited from coming back to Japan, which was quite draconian. The series goes on. A place called Dejima, a man-made fan-shaped island was constructed in Nagasaki Harbour, and this was intended for the Portuguese originally, but they didn't last long,

and that's where eventually the Dutch would end up, and they were confined. And I always think of this place as a sort of Alcatraz. But internally, people were denied the right to travel, as I understand it, or they had to get permission to travel, sorry, and they were denied the right to leave. Yes, and you weren't allowed to build ocean-going ships. They were just ships that could deal with traveling along militarily, because most of the movement actually in Japan was by sea,

but ocean-going ships were banned. And again, this sounds very odd that you wouldn't allow your people to trade. From an island? Absolutely, absolutely, extraordinarily. And the trouble is that, of course, the trade then fell into the hands of the people who did have the boats. The Chinese, as it turned out after, let's say, 1639, the Chinese and the Dutch. And they were, in fact, in charge of all this trade. But just to get a grip on this, Richard, and it's quite important, I think, for the programme.

that we, this was a real, they meant it. They didn't say we're going to try to do this to help us along the way. This was an attempt to create a different sort of Japan. And they followed that, for better and worse, which we will discuss. They followed that for the next 200 years. They wanted to make it sufficient to itself. It happened to be self-sufficient as we material in food and so on. And then wanted nobody to come in, nobody to go out without their extreme permission, exceptional permission and so on.

So what was going on? They knew that was going on. Rebecca. Well, I don't think it was ever such a conscious attempt to sort of sit down and develop a clearly articulated policy that would shape Japan over the coming centuries. I think they probably wouldn't recognize a lot of the things we're talking about and a lot of the things that happened later in the 19th century

as a consequence of the edicts that they brought in. And we should remember also that the idea of Sarkoku didn't really, the word didn't even, been coming to Japanese until the 19th century. What they were doing at the time was entirely consistent with practice in East Asia. The Ming dynasty had also put a ban on foreign travel and had not been trading. That was lifted in the 1560s, but they had very strictly tried to control this system of Kaikin maritime prohibitions.

And they had rejected overtures from European nations who wanted to trade. with them at various times in their history and at other times they would trade with them. But there's this... Sorry, I'll clear my side. Please go on. Yeah, so there are periods throughout Chinese history as well where they didn't trade with Western nations either. And what Japan was doing was just very similar to that.

I don't think it was necessarily about Japan being different and set aside. Now, I'm not interested in being different at this time. I'm interested in what it did for itself. And it might have been like Japan did a century two before another Asian countries did, but we're trying to concentrate on this. And if it wasn't a self-conscious act on the part of that new shogunate,

what was it then? Andrew Cobb. Just to add to this, I think it's important to bear in mind that the international context in the 1630s, it could be seen as a very pragmatic, sensible response to the threat of impending chaos. There was civil war going on in China,

where the Ming dynasty was being invaded by Manchu armies, A few years previously there had been some spats off the coast of Taiwan between Japanese ships operated by Warlord Daimyo and the Dutch. And so in order to avoid international conflict from coming home to roost within Japan, drawing back from any scenario which would invite such dangers could be seen in the context of the 1630s, as entirely sensible. Can I just say something about the rationale for not be that interested in trade? Now, the mentality of how the society was organised in Tokugawa, Japan, was that they saw themselves as having four distinct strata.

There were the samurai, there were the farmers, there were the artisans, and there were the merchants. and note where the merchants come right at the bottom. And this is, as it were, a Confucian view of society. And so trade was always, merchants and trade were always seen with a sort of skeptical eye. And you actually also said that Japan was self-sufficient. This is actually quite true. Why would you trade if you were self-sufficient?

It was to get in goods like silk, things that you get, oddities, things of interest, which were not absolutely necessary for your survival. This was looked down on by an official view, because this was not what a gentleman did. You didn't buy frippers, you didn't waste money on luxuries. you didn't actually dig up all your silver and send it off through the Dutch to China in order to get fripperies back.

What was the point? And so you can see there's this kind of anti-trade mentality which is quite important. Can I come back to that with you then, Rebecca Clemens? Most foreigners have banned from Japan. They had a particular virulence against the Portuguese partly to do with the association with Christianity and the association with providing weapons for the outlaying regions.

but the Dutch were allowed to remain. They were, what did you call it? You called it Alcatraz. They put on an sort of Alcatraz Island, but still there they were. Why did they do that? Why did they let the Dutch stay? Well, one important reason is that the Dutch were Protestant, not Catholic at this time,

and were not associated directly with missionary activity, which had been one of the concerns of the shogunate. Another reason is that the Dutch were happy to accept the appearance of a tributary relationship. As Andrew mentioned, Japan was trying to establish itself as an alternative sort of source of political legitimacy. And to do this, they were modelling their relations with other countries on the Chinese tributary system.

The tribute being, you were dependent, you paid tribute which showed that you were inferior to the Chinese. Yes, that's right. You essentially become a vassal of the, originally the Chinese emperor. In this case, we have the Japanese. well the shogun. So what, although the Dutch weren't official diplomatic representatives of their country,

that was the Dutch East India Company, they were happy to go through the motions of going up to the capital of Edor once a year and then later on once every four years. It was a trip that took 90 days. They came bearing gifts. They were admitted into the presence of the shogun. They bowed. They paid homage and then they left.

And they were quite happy to do that for the sake of maintaining a trawaining. relationship and also a base from which to refuel and that sort of thing, restock their supplies in Japan. And the other reason, which is quite important, is that the Dutch compiled reports on world affairs. They were requested to do this. This was part of the conditions of them being allowed to stay. And so they were, in some ways, quite an important source of information on what was going on in Europe and Southeast Asia for the Tokugawa Shogunate. So although they closed it down to a certain extent, we're already talking about trade going on,

sort of allowed with the Dutch and allowed in some ways with the Chinese and grudgingly permitted with a tiny bit with the Russians so that's still going on but they tried to enforce this this Tokugawa tried to enforce this as the century and centuries went on Richard Bowering what did they do? How did they enforce it? Did they send their

Samir out and what did they do? I think the answer here is that you are dealing with a military government and the legacy of the talking hour period is in fact this a populace that does what it's told so that for instance if we come back to the edicts now they would be they're very short as we've seen they would be produced they would then be sent out to every village

every port every city in the land and they would be put up on notice boards. They would be read out. And there was also a system of spies throughout the country. And the extraordinary thing is that this worked. That it, I would have thought that among all countries in the world at that particular time, Japan was the most tightly controlled. When we talked about enforcing and are we talking about executing people,

imprisoning them, no messing in that sense. No messing around. There was absolutely no. messing around. I mean, to give you another example, there was an Italian priest called Sidotti who managed to get in, I think, about 16,

1700, was it? Yeah, 1700, I think. And he was immediately, as soon as he arrived, because he had arrived on a Chinese ship, taken up to Edon, he was interrogated. He lasted some time

actually, but eventually, well, he was he was buried alive. Right. Andra Cobbink, what were Westerners making of this Japanese experiment? What evidence we have from the West, which is beginning to boom away of it at this time. So what did they make of it?

Well, the Westerners didn't have so much information. We've mentioned already that the Japanese were collecting information. But those who did, what did they say? Well, we have to look at who was actually collecting information about Japan. The merchants employed by the Dutch East India Company, they didn't really send too much information. So are you saying there's not much information in the way? Shall we skip that question? Well, no, there's a significant amount, but it's not so much the merchants, but the doctors that the Dutch East India Company employs.

Every trading person needs a doctor. And they did employ doctors sometimes Dutch, but sometimes German. Swedish. And it was these doctors who had an academic interest in Japan. And after their term in Japan, after they came back, some of them wrote up their memoirs, or in the case of one German doctor called Engelbert Kemfer. In the 1690s, he lived in Dejimov for a few years. He went up to Edo once and came back. And a few decades later, in 1725, I think, he published in English initially a history of Japan. And it was books like this, notably his history of Japan.

Was he saying this is an isolated place? Was he saying what you have been? Well, he more than anybody said it was an isolated place because in one of the appendixes right at the back of his three-volume history of Japan, he wrote an essay when he put in no uncertain terms how bad and how unnatural the Japanese state authorities were. for unnaturally secluding their population from the rest of the world.

Yes, and from lucrative trade. Andrew Cummings mentioned that, Rebecca, but there's quite a bit of Western scholarship found its way into Japan. And what Andrew was saying gives us, I think, the main clue is that doctors were going there. Doctors seemed to have been welcome. And they took, let's just stick with medicine. They took the medical knowledge that had been developed in the West, which was very different from the medical knowledge.

Japan, which came from China. And this came to an head ahead in an almost test case where a woman criminal called Grandma Tea Bag, what she called. Oh, Lady Green Tea, yes. Was dissected and the revelation was, oh, China was wrong. So can you tell us about how information infiltrated? Well, initially, in the case of medicine, the Japanese saw the Dutch doctors practicing their craft. And we have to remember it was quite primitive. Western medicine was quite primitive at this time, of course. But, yes, anatomy was something that they were very impressed by.

But initially they just saw that the Dutch doctors had some effect in treating their patients. And so some of them began to learn this. And later on, this sort of information passed into Japan in the form of books that the Dutch brought with them. So initially it was just watching and being taught by word of mouth. But yes, particularly the anatomy textbooks. Because you've got to remember that dissection was not something that was practiced in Chinese medicine,

which is the traditional Chinese medicine had been what the Japanese medical establishment was practicing up to that point. So they didn't know what was inside the body. And in fact, doctors wouldn't do it. They had to get a special class of person to perform, for instance, the dissection of old lady green tea. They've done by a leather worker, wasn't it? Yes, the class of people who deal with dead. animals and dead bodies. But Andrew Coving, other material from the West,

other intellectual matter began to drift in on astronomy and navigations. Can you just give us a snapshot of that? Well, following on from medicine, astronomy was also highly regarded because to rule an agrarian economy, you needed to predict the weather. and they relied on Chinese calendars for the most part. But when they got their hands on Dutch knowledge of astronomy,

they found this useful, especially when the Chinese calendars didn't work. They thought it might be worth revising. So following on from medicine, astronomy comes in, and it's during this process, of course, that they find out that the sun is in the centre of the solar system. Copernican theory arrives in the late 18th century, and that, of course, is a revelation. So that's moving on in that way. So we have this state, Richard Bering,

which was some trade, some intellectual ideas come in, but we could still say by and large doing what the Takugawa Shogunate, which he still wants it to do on the whole. It was finally ended in 1854 by the famous Commodore Perry, American naval officer, with some gunboats. He turned up there.

What happened? Well, it's rather odd to think of America doing it rather than Britain, actually. But they did. And what happened was that there was a growing trade between the United States and China. And there had to be somewhere, because it's an awful long way across the Pacific, and they are now using, of course, steam. And they needed somewhere to get coal. They needed somewhere to get coal. They needed somewhere to. to get vitals and all that kind of kind of thing. And the policy of the Japanese to just refuse all shipping. All shipping came this way. And even if ships were wrecked offshore, absolutely. And their citizens were urging and kill them. They were.

They were. Because this precedent, and of course one of the problems in the Chokangab period was the conservatism. And the fact that the third Shogun had said, no, we're not going to have any. any sort of dealings with these foreigners, was taken as gospel from then on. Now, he wanted to open it out for this particular reason,

rather than anything else. I mean, trade, as it were, yes, that was a possibility, but he needed somewhere, the America needed somewhere to be able to refuel their ships. And he ended up in the end, at the end, area around Edor. And he happened to arrive at a particular time when the shogunate was looking a little frail, that there were already arguments as to whether we ought to open the country or not,

because, of course, there is pressure from Britain and there is increasing pressure from Russia and the north. And he just happened to arrive at the right time. But he arrived with gunships, didn't he? When he threatened bombardment, he hammered away. Yes, he threatened bombardment. And then they... Sorry.

Now the people who took over were, of course, the British, and they really brought there. They really did start bombarding. Why did America not carry on? Why were they not at the centre throughout? I thought about this for a little bit, actually, and it turns out there was the civil war. If you think about it, it's these juxtaposition.

62-65, the American Civil War, quite clearly they were not that interested, and the British, as it were, took over from them. But what we're talking about is technology, first of America, then with Britain, in the shape of warships coming on and pounding Japan into letting them in and signing a treaty. And that was the end, really, of this period. And what did the treaty say, Rebecca? The treaty with the US? The first one that was negotiated.

It opened up five Japanese ports to trade with Japan, and that was closely followed by treaties with England and Russia and France as well. And these are what are known as the unequal treaties nowadays because Japan was in a weaker position. And these sorts of treaties were actually signed. between Western powers and the so-called Orient, other nations as well as Japan. And they denied Japan the right to levy its own import and export duties. And there was also the rule of extraterritoriality.

So if, say, a US or a British national committed a crime on Japanese soil, they wouldn't be tried under Japanese law. They would be tried under the law of their own nation. and it would be dealt with by their own country. And this was part of this idea that non-Western nations were not civilized enough for their legal systems to be enforced on Westerners. And Japan was included in this category.

This has been euphemistically called the opening up, Andrew Cobra, Japan, by some sources. How, what were the most direct effects on Japan of this opening up, of this being forced to trade, being forced to let the Western America come in in numbers? Well, inflation, massive inflation to start with. Political chaos.

It brought the ailing Tokugawa Shogunate really to its knees as the other domains who had been, well, compliant for the last 200-odd years. They realized that this system wasn't really working anymore. The Shogunate was supposed to protect the Japanese population from the barbarians. and it was increasingly obvious that they weren't, which caused an arms race, and then a short civil war, which meant the end of the shogunate.

And its replacement with a central government headed by the Meiji Emperor, of course, which launches Japan headlong into the modern world and the international community. Richard, Richard Bowen, can you give us a little more about the impact of this and this launch that, and that Andrew has mentioned,

and a comic has mentioned, into the modern world, the Beijing, this transition. Again, it's as sudden as in 1600, isn't it? Once, then there's a central government, then the shogunates gone, and the Beijing dynasty come back. Yes, yes. I mean, the history of Japan at that time is, I mean, that's why it's fascinating, it's one of suddenness all the time.

In a very, very short period, you begin to get a country which can deal with the world, on equal terms and the story of how that happened, of course, is a very complex one. I mean, you have to remember that by 1902, there is an Anglo-Japanese alliance. So you've gone from late 1860s to 1902 and Japan becomes, as it were, an equal rather than being bombarded. The only other point that I'd have to make here is that in 1906, of course, you have the Russo-Japanese War, and that's the first time that a non-Asian country has actually, sorry, a non-European country has wiped the floor with a European country.

So the speed is quite extraordinary. Japan wiped the floor with Russia. Yeah, absolutely. Rebecca. I think it's also, I would agree, but I think it's also important to remember that in addition to the sudden changes, there had been an interest in the West and a considerable amount of sort of research and knowledge gathering being done by private intellectuals and some of the, the domain warlords and this interest in Western technologies and things like that predate this major revolution.

So there was a receptivity to Western ideas already and people who had begun to learn English, who already spoke Dutch and that sort of thing. I think on that note, yes, as we've said it, it was a very sudden change and the results were remarkable. But as you were eluding, there's this receptivity. Japan had been developing already in its own way, even though it did not have as much information about the West that it did have later on. So in the late 19th century, when observers looked at Japan and remarked on its remarkable progress,

it actually wasn't so miraculous, because they weren't starting from square one. They already had some knowledge to work from in the first place. I think you also have to remember that it's a highly urbanized society. I mean, by 1700, Edo is the largest city in the world. Osaka is a huge city. We're already talking about a country where literacy is very important, where education is very important.

So by the end of this period, we're talking about a country where educational standards were at least as high as they were in Europe. Is there a sense in which this period was the branding period of Japanese, I don't know, identity. We would like to answer that. But we close down. Yes, a sort of crucible, really.

If you look at the formulation of Japanese identity and Japanese society, if you think of Edo, the capital is now Tokyo, this urban cosmopolitan society, the floating world culture. This all happens during this period. Well, thank you all very much. It's been a pound through 250s. But thank you for taking it on. There are Rebecca Clements, Richard Bowering,

and Andrew Cobbing. Next week we will be talking about the Amazons, the female warriors of classical myth, or was it? Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash radio 4.