Particularly since the 1960s, historians of Japan have studied in depth foreign relations in the first half of the seventeenth century, a period when the Tokugawa shogunate (bakufu) instituted measures that significantly altered Japan's interactions with the outside world, creating what is often dubbed a “closed country” (sakoku) policy. Michael S. Laver seeks to shed new light on this seminal period through a detailed examination of the “sakoku edicts,” seventeen directives concerning intercourse with the outside world issued by the bakufu in 1635. Laver methodically analyzes each edict, organizing his discussion into chapters on the edicts that restricted travel outside the country, those that prohibited Christianity, and those directed at foreign trade. His other chapters examine related events of the period: the expulsion of the Portuguese following the Shimabara Rebellion, the transfer of Dutch traders to the island of Dejima in Nagasaki, and the expulsion of Japanese women who had children with European men, as well as the children themselves. Concerning foreign relations early in the seventeenth century, Laver aims to show first that “the policy that came to be known as sakoku was an evolving process that began with specific reactions to particular historical stimuli,” and second that bakufu leaders acted largely to shore up their still tenuous political position in the decades after the establishment of Tokugawa hegemony following the Battle of Sekigahara (1600) (p. x).
Laver asserts that “even though the sakoku edicts appear to be concerned primarily with foreign policy, in reality they were efforts to bolster bakufu strength and prestige at home” (p. xi). He stresses that bakufu leaders were especially concerned with enhancing their regime's politico-economic position vis-à-vis powerful lords in Kyushu. Largely in pursuit of that agenda, they prohibited Japanese from traveling abroad, forbade Japanese ships from sailing to foreign ports, and banned the construction of large oceangoing vessels. Laver concludes that Tokugawa leaders issued anti-Christian edicts in order keep out a dangerous ideological contagion but contends that their “biggest concern” was “that most of the Christian converts were located on the island of Kyushu, among the very daimyo that had fought against the Tokugawa at Sekigahara” (p. 79). He notes that over half of the 1635 edicts involved foreign trade (with four related to silk imports), stressing that these indicate a Tokugawa regime seeking not to eliminate foreign trade but rather to control all aspects of it. In their directives about foreign trade, the Tokugawa again were “primarily concerned with consolidating their own power and prestige at the expense of the regional daimyo” (p. 115). In his closing chapters, Laver offers some intriguing conclusions, for example a novel comparison of the seventeenth-century Tokugawa stance to that of the Hōjō in the late thirteenth century. He notes that both consolidated their position vis-à-vis lords in western Japan thanks in part to the specter of foreign invasion: the Hōjō played upon fears of another Mongol force appearing on the Kyushu coast while the Tokugawa gained power by stressing the threat of a Portuguese or larger Christian incursion.
Unfortunately, this is one of the few fresh insights in a study that largely synthesizes earlier research. Much of the book affirms Ronald Toby's seminal interpretation of Tokugawa dominance in foreign relations, developed through a careful study of Japanese diplomacy in the seventeenth century.Footnote 2 For one, Laver stresses a point that Toby made apparent decades ago: that the Tokugawa regime sought not to eliminate foreign trade but merely to control it to its advantage. To better understand Laver's interpretation, this reader would have valued more critical engagement with Toby and the work of other important scholars on seventeenth-century foreign relations cited in the monograph, for example, Arano Yasunori, Iwao Seiichi, and Robert Innes.Footnote 3
In addition, Laver's main thesis—that the Tokugawa goal in foreign relations centered on counteracting the power of daimyo in the Kyushu region—deals with a fascinating aspect of foreign relations early in the Edo period that has not been comprehensively explored in English. Nonetheless Laver tells us little about how Kyushu domains themselves actually viewed and executed the 1635 edicts to help us determine how, as he asserts, Tokugawa leaders gained the upper hand in supervising foreign relations for the Japanese state. He instead provides discussions of events in and around Nagasaki, such the Dutch move from Hirado and the Shimabara Rebellion. We therefore learn much about these important events and relations with outside parties more generally, but do not gain a firm understanding of the interplay between the bakufu and Kyushu domains.
Overall this book offers an accessible overview of foreign relations in the first half of the seventeenth century and therefore would be useful in an undergraduate survey if a more reasonably priced paperback edition becomes available. But unfortunately it falls short in shedding new light on the course of foreign relations in the early Edo period.
