JAPAN
The fact cannot be too clearly recognised. It is the chief lesson taught by the events outlined above. Throughout the whole of that period of isolation, Occidentals were not known to the Japanese by any of the terms now in common use,—as gwaikoku-jiri, seiyo-jin, or i-jin, which embody the simple meaning, foreigner, or Western, or alien: they were popularly called bateren (padre). Thus completely had foreign intercourse and Christian propagandism become identified in the eyes of the people. And when it is remembered that "foreign intercourse" associated with Christianity had come to be synonymous in Japanese ears with foreign aggression, with the subversal of the Mikado's sacred dynasty, and with the loss of the independence of the Country of the Gods, there is no difficulty in understanding the attitude of the nation's mind towards this question. In these considerations, too, is found a reason for the lack of any element of national ambition in the ultimate policy of Iyeyasu, and from first to last in the policy of his greatest successor, Iyemitsu.
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