Sakoku: Japan's seclusion edicts close the country

Date

1633–1639 (sakoku edicts)

Category

Politics & governance

Region

Japan

Era

Early Modern

Significance

Between 1633 and 1639 the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, issued a series of decrees that formalised sakoku, the policy of national seclusion.

The edicts forbade Japanese subjects from leaving the country or returning from abroad on pain of death, banned the construction of ocean-going ships, and outlawed Christianity, which the shogunate viewed as a subversive foreign creed and a vector of European influence. The Christian-led Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38 hardened the policy, and in 1639 Portuguese ships were barred entirely. Spain had already been expelled in 1624. Foreign trade was funnelled into tightly controlled channels: the Dutch, who avoided missionary activity, were confined from 1641 to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour under close surveillance, while limited commerce continued with China and, through intermediaries, Korea and the Ryukyus. Sakoku was never total isolation, but it gave the shogunate firm control over foreign contact, information and bullion flows. The system endured for more than two centuries, fostering a distinctive internal development of Japanese economy and culture while limiting exposure to European colonial pressures, until American gunboats forced Japan open in the mid-nineteenth century.

Empires active in 1633–1639 (sakoku edicts)

• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• Ottoman Empire
  1299 CE – 1922 CE
• Mughal Empire
  1526 CE – 1857 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Ming Dynasty
  1368 CE – 1644 CE

Related politics & governance events

• Founding of the Tokugawa shogunate
  1603 (after Sekigahara, 1600)
• Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years' War
  October 1648
• Queen Njinga's resistance in Ndongo and Matamba
  1624–1663
• Execution of Charles I
  30 January 1649
• The Declaration of Independence
  4 July 1776
• Aurangzeb, the Mughal apogee and the seeds of decline
  1679 (jizya reimposed); reign 1658–1707

Further reading

The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

The wider story

The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

Timothy Brook

Engaging survey of Yuan-Ming China (Harvard History of Imperial China).

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