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Japanese contact with the West

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This is the Baroque Cycle page for Japanese contact with the West.

Stephensonia

Clan Goto must have a love/hate relationship with the West.

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Contact with the West

The first contact with the West occurred about 1542, when a Portuguese ship, blown off its course to China, landed in Japan. Firearms introduced by Portuguese would bring the major innovation to Sengoku period culminating in the Battle of Nagashino where reportedly 3.000 rifles (actual number is believed to be around 2.000) cut down charging ranks of Samurai. During the next century, traders from Portugal, the Netherlands, England, and Spain arrived, as did Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan missionaries.

During the early part of the 17th century, Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate suspected that the traders and missionaries were actually forerunners of a military conquest by European powers. This caused the shogunate to place foreigners under progressively tighter restrictions. An English mariner named William Adams had journeyed with a Dutch fleet and been shipwrecked in Japan in 1600. He had managed to impress Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu with his seafaring knowledge and was made an honorary Samurai and granted a large estate. When English traders from the East India Company made landfall in 1613 they were able to obtain Adams' assistance, as a favourite of the Shogun, in establishing a factory for trading. Ultimately, Japan forced all foreigners to leave and barred all relations with the outside world except for severely restricted commercial contacts with Dutch and Chinese merchants at Nagasaki.

Russian encroachments from the north led the shogunate to extend direct rule to Hokkaido and Sakhalin in 1807 but the policy of exclusion continued. This isolation lasted for 200 years, until, on July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy with four warships: the Mississippi, Plymouth, Saratoga, and Susquehanna, steamed into the bay at Edo (Tokyo) and displayed the threatening power of his ships' cannon. He demanded that Japan open to trade with the West. These ships became known as the kurofune (黒船), the Black Ships.