EARLY TOKUGAWA TIMES
policy could scarcely be conceived. In 1541 we find the Japanese celebrated, or notorious, throughout the whole of the Far East for exploits abroad; we find them known as the "Kings of the Sea;" we find them welcoming foreigners with cordiality and opposing no obstacles to foreign commerce or even to the propagandism of foreign creeds; we find them so quick to recognise the benefits of trade and so apt to pursue them that, in the space of a few years, they establish commercial relations with no less than twenty over-sea markets; we find them authorising the Portuguese and the English to trade at every port in the Empire; we find, in short, all the elements requisite for a career of commercial enterprise, ocean-going adventure and international liberality. In 1641 everything is reversed. Trade is interdicted to all Western people except the Dutch, and they are confined to a little island, two hundred yards in length by eighty yards in width. The least symptom of predilection for an alien creed is punished with awful rigour. Any attempt to leave the limits of the realm involves decapitation. Not a ship large enough to pass beyond the shadow of the coast may be built.
However unwelcome the admission, it is apparent that for all these changes Christianity was responsible. The policy of seclusion adopted by Japan in the early part of the seventeenth century and resolutely pursued until the middle of the nineteenth, was anti-Christian, not anti-foreign.
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