Presented to the University of Chicago Department of History In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the BA Degree, April 7, 2017
The University of Chicago
Abstract:
This paper examines British and Japanese foreign policy during the 1800s to explore the relationship between rhetoric and reality during times of so-called “isolation,” in order to help the reader understand what exactly it means for a country, or a nation, to be isolated. Japan in the early 1800s existed on the opposite end of the earth, and of the global power spectrum, from the British Empire of the late 1800s. Both experienced what are now called periods of “isolation,” yet the definitions of the countries’ “isolation” are profoundly different. “Isolation” is not an objective theoretical concept but rather a subjective reality. The paper treats ideological and practical rationale for “isolationist” foreign policy as separate, but overlapping, topics to be analyzed, in order to arrive at the truth behind the myth of isolationism.
“We have no friends and no nation loves us.”
– Spencer Wilkinson, The Nation’s Awakening, 1896
“It is the practice of foreigners…to propagate Christianity and make other unreasonable demands.”
– Tokugawa Nariaki to Bakufu, 1853
Introduction
Japan’s period of isolation, called sakoku, has been a subject of heated debate in East Asian studies during the past few decades. Sakoku lasted from the early 1600s until the 1850s. Soon after its end date, Great Britain also entered a period of isolation that lasted from the late 1880s through the first few years of 1900s. This period, called “Splendid Isolation” by some members of the late Victorian government, has not received nearly the magnitude of focus levied on sakoku.
On February 14, 1902, just days after the British foreign secretary and Japanese foreign minister signed an alliance treaty, Britain’s Earl of Rosebery gave a speech on the controversial union to a crowd in Liverpool:
Yesterday in the House of Lords I was listening to the Secretary of State making with all the sound of triumph and congratulation a recitation and recantation of the once popular doctrine of Splendid Isolation. How much we heard of Splendid Isolation! How many tables were banged about Splendid Isolation! And now we have come to the alliance with Japan.[1]
Rosebery’s cynicism on the voguish nature of foreign policy aside, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance marked a historic moment in each party’s history. Britain had been following that “once popular doctrine” of avoidance of foreign entanglements for at least 15 years, and arguably upwards of three decades. [2] It was the alliance with Japan that contemporaries as well as 21st century historians believe brought Britain out of its “Splendid Isolation.” Less than 50 years prior to signing the alliance, Japan had abandoned its own doctrine of isolation from foreign affairs that had stood in place for nearly two-and-a-half centuries. The Japanese government then spent the final decades of the nineteenth century industrializing and modernizing. Its alliance with Britain is widely regarded as the first proof of its status as a world power. With the signing of the treaty in 1902, Japan and Britain both hoped to establish a lasting bulwark against their common enemy Russia.
“Isolation” is not merely a nineteenth-century phenomenon that can be easily relegated to the history books. Indeed, on June 23, 2016, the British populace voted to leave the European Union (EU). For some, the motivation mainly was economic; for others, race and anti-immigrant beliefs drove their votes. The majority of voters felt that British national hegemony could only be maintained in separation from the continent, and so they forsook Europe’s defining international political and economic structure. The story of twenty-first century Japan is different, as China, Korea, and Russia are its only proximate neighbors. But like the British toward the EU, the Japanese government has, at best, little love for their neighbors—with the possible exception of South Korea—as economic or political partners. Japan also possesses its own racial prejudices and anti-immigrant tendencies. Both Britain and Japan, in 2017, could be said to be “isolated,” in ways as different as they are similar. So how could, or should, a twenty-first century citizen understand this isolation? For better or for worse, isolation has precedence, and it is through an analysis of different forms of this isolation that one can learn how to approach, to avoid, to cope with or even to champion the politics of isolation in one’s own context. Additionally, diplomacy itself is rhetoric, articulating the subjective beliefs of those who practice it. This paper will approach isolationist policy not as a provable truth, but as an object of discussion and belief. To the extent that Britain was isolated, this paper will examine the rhetoric around that.
The histories of Japan and Britain are rarely compared, much less the histories of each country’s diplomacy. But, an understanding of each’s political and diplomatic currents during their periods of isolation sheds light on the other’s complexities. This paper will treat Britain during its period of “Splendid Isolation” in the 1890s through 1902, and Japan during the last 50 years of its own so-called “isolationist” period, which ended in 1853, as its subjects. The paper will compare and contrast the two island nations to argue that although both countries engaged in the rhetoric of diplomatic isolationism, both were, in fact, constantly politically engaged with the outside world. Additionally, by comparing and contrasting the motivations, ideologies and actions of each country’s foreign engagement, we as historians can achieve a greater understanding of what it means for a country, a nation, a people, to be isolated.
Japanese Context
Before analyzing and comparing the isolations of Britain and Japan, it is necessary to define and qualify these isolations individually. The isolation of Japan, known to most as “sakoku” (literally “closed country”), began in 1635, when the shogun of Japan Tokugawa Iemitsu and his council issued an edict today officially called “The Edict of 1635 Ordering the Closing of Japan: Addressed to the Joint Bugyo of Nagasaki.” [3] The Edict contained such articles as “Japanese ships are strictly forbidden to leave for foreign countries,” and “If any Japanese returns from overseas after residing there, he must be put to death.”[4] Besides a number of articles specifying rules about specific trade goods, however, the largest portion of the edict was dedicated specifically to laws prohibiting the teaching of, following of, and the general presence of the Christian religion in Japan. The edict promised to “reward accordingly” any Japanese person who shared with the government “the whereabouts of the followers of padres [i.e., Christians].” Additionally, the edict stated, “if there are any Southern Barbarians [i.e., Europeans] who propagate the teachings of padres… they may be incarcerated.”[5] From a Christo- and Eurocentric view, this edict could be—and quite often is—interpreted as a statement by the Japanese government that Japan was completely cutting themselves off from civilization. To a Westerner in the seventeenth century, what was civilization but Christendom? From the vantage point of Western observers, to reject that great spirit of Europe was to reject progress itself in the name of barbarism.
Tokugawa Iemitsu did not see his realm’s rejection of Christianity and Europe as a rejection of a chance for salvation, but as a rejection of insidious foreign imperialism.[6] Indeed, the European involvement in historical portrayal of Japan is evident in the word sakoku itself. A catch-all term used by early modern Westerners to describe Japanese foreign policy during the Tokugawa (or Edo) period of 1603-1868, sakoku is a Eurocentric concept. The word was only coined in 1801, nearly 200 years after the expulsion of Christians from the archipelago. [7] According to historian Ronald Toby, a scholar (and debunker) of the historical concept of sakoku, the “term [sakoku] does not represent the perceptions of Japanese about their own policies and history, but rather the mistranslated perception of a European visitor of the 1690s.”[8] That European visitor was German doctor Engelbert Kaempfer; the mistranslator, Shizuki Tadao, who published an essay entitled Sakokuron in 1801.[9] In this essay, according to Toby, “Shizuki… merely translated into Japanese an appendix from… Kaempfer’s The History of Japan,” relying “on the Dutch translation of Kaempfer’s essay, entitled in English ‘An Enquiry, whether it be conducive to the good of the Japanese Empire to keep it shut up as it now is, and not to suffer its inhabitants to have any Commerce with foreign nations, either at home or abroad.’”[10] Kaempfer wrote the essay in the late seventeenth century; it was translated into Dutch prior to 1801, when it was finally translated to Japanese by Shizuki.
Sakoku, then, was not a concept the Japanese themselves were familiar with until at least the early nineteenth century. And the title of Kaempfer’s essay belies his ignorance of the very basis of Tokugawa foreign policy. Japan in fact did “suffer its inhabitants any Commerce with foreign nations”; meaning that Japan engaged in foreign trade. However, only one of the nations with whom Japan traded was Western, and it was not Kaempfer’s Germany, but the Netherlands. In his analysis of Tokugawa foreign policy, Kaempfer ignores the rich and long-established network of East Asian trade in which Japan actively participated, alongside its Korean and newly-formed Qing Chinese neighbors, among others.[11] The story of isolation, and particularly of sakoku, is thus far more complex and far less all-encompassing than Westerners believe(d). Toby’s book State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan argues that whatever policies of isolation Tokugawa Japan may have possessed were much more limited than previously assumed.
What was the true state of Japanese foreign relations as Japan entered the nineteenth century? Japan was actively participating in dynamic trade markets across East Asia. Historian Robert Hellyer, author of Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640 – 1868, defines Japanese relations with the outside as “guarded engagement.”[12] Hellyer says, “Guarded engagement… was defined [in part] by Japanese commercial penetration into Ezo (modern day Hokkaido),” but the markets did not stop there. “In Ezo, marine products were harvested and processed for the China market,” while “in the south, Satsuma increased its commercial dominance over the northern Ryukyuan chain, establishing sugar plantations on Amami Oshima and two other islands.”[13]Meanwhile, the Japanese island province of Tsushima in the Korean Strait was engaged in constant trade with Korea; more than half of Tsushima’s rice was imported from the Korean mainland.[14]
The Japanese government maintained different relations with all of the above foreign entities. Ezo, for instance, was a pseudo-colony of Japan, under the lordship of the Matsumae domain who only directly controlled a small southern portion of the island but who heavily influenced and exploited the native Ainu people who occupied the rest. Ryukyu, meanwhile, paid tribute to both the shogun and the Chinese emperor. During the Tokugawa period, Ryukyu officials were often instructed by the Japanese to direct Western traders “to make their [trade] appeals directly to the Qing court” as a way of deterring those Westerners from making mercantile advances on Japan via Ryukyu.[15] Korea, ostensibly within the political sphere of the Qing, nevertheless engaged in their own dwindling trade with Japan through Tsushima.[16] Qing China itself, finally, engaged in constant trade of metals and agricultural and marine products throughout the Tokugawa period. But the Japanese also constantly imported knowledge and philosophy from China, as had been the tradition for “1600 or 1700 years,” according to the scholar Takano Choei.[17] Thus, during their period of so called sakoku “isolationism,” Japan continued to maintain a complex network of trade, tributaries, and diplomatic partnerships with its neighbors.
The Dutch, then, were the notable exception in Japan’s trading partners throughout the Tokugawa period. The only Westerners allowed to interact with Japan, the Dutch were nevertheless mostly forbidden from operating on Japan proper. They were relegated to the small human-made island of Dejima (or Deshima) in the harbor of Nagasaki, the only city in which any foreigners could come to trade.[18] This was the only place in Japan where the Dutch could establish warehouses, trade offices, and dwellings. According to Grant Goodman, author of Japan and the Dutch 1600-1853, “Had it not been for the steady and moderate policy of the Dutch East India Company, Dutch residents in Japan would undoubtedly have experienced the fate of the Spaniards and the Portuguese,” the last of whom had been summarily kicked out or executed in 1639.[19] The Japanese view of the Dutch is just as remarkable as the latter’s presence in Japan: Goodman compares the Japanese relation to the Dutch “with the ancient Chinese concept of tribute,” a key concept of Confucian philosophy “by which Chinese emperors gained an ethical sanction for their exercise of political hegemony. The virtuous ruler by his proper moral conduct attracted the rude barbarians into his sphere of influence.”[20] Whether or not the Japanese really viewed their relationship with the Dutch in this Confucian manner, it is nevertheless true that many Japanese, particularly members of the governing body, viewed the Dutch as barbarians equal to their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts. But, as Goodman points out, the Japanese permitted the Dutch to stay probably because of the latter’s moderate foreign policy. Focused on trade, the Dutch took a relaxed approach toward missionary activity. That the Dutch were permitted to maintain their relations with Japan further elucidates the true state of Japanese “isolation” during this period. Although the shogunate was ever wary of the Dutch presence, they in fact only isolated their country from overtly, religiously aggressive countries such as Spain or Portugal.
British Context
6,000 miles away and half a century later, Britain, too, entered a period of what has become referred to as isolation. Known as “Splendid Isolation” by both its proponents and its enemies, this period lasted between ten and twenty years. The start and end dates are nebulous at best due to the ill-defined nature of the concept of “isolation” that still befuddles historians today; some evidence suggests the period began with the election of the conservative 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, Robert Gascone Cecil, to the position of prime minister in 1886. Other thinkers, in contemporary England, lamented that seclusionism had been Britain’s policy since the Crimean War.[21] Many contemporaries and later historians suggest that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 dealt the mortal blow to “Splendid Isolation,” while others argue it was only in 1906, with the ascension of a liberal majority to parliament, that Britain’s reserved foreign policy finally came to an end. Part of the problem in defining the boundaries of the heyday of “Splendid Isolation” is a lack of any written seclusionist doctrine. There exists no “Edict of 1892 Ordering the Closing of Britain,” neither was there a Matthew Perry equivalent who, arriving in 1902, demanded that the Empire “open up” to all the major European powers. In Britain, “isolation” comprised a tendency by leaders toward reserved engagement, not a code of law.
Its dubious start and end dates are not the only reasons “Splendid Isolation” puzzles and frustrates historians. As in Japan, Britain’s seclusion was never absolute. When compared to the strict terms of the Japanese Edicts of 1639, however, the practical definition of “Splendid Isolation” appears at first glance rather minimal. Prime Minister Salisbury himself, viewed by contemporaries and historians alike as the head of the isolationist movement, stated that “Splendid Isolation” was simply the rejection of “permanent, standing alliances when war is not in immediate view.”[22] Where the Japanese government entirely outlawed all diplomacy and trade with but a select few countries, the British merely shunned military alliances. The British Empire stretched across the whole world, with colonies on every continent except Antarctica. It controlled many of the world’s most valuable trade nodes. Furthermore, they operated in a world that was far more globalized than it had been over half a century earlier, during the late years of the Tokugawa shogunate. To so wholly reject foreign engagement would have subjected the empire to complete instability and probably collapse.
While the British had been the preeminent military, naval, and economic power in Europe for much of the nineteenth century, this was beginning to change as 1900 grew closer. The earth-shaking advantage Britain had gained by being at the forefront of the industrial revolution wore off as nations like Germany and France caught up in technological prowess. The Empire had gone all but unchallenged in its colonial conquests in Africa, North America, and Asia in the early nineteenth century. But as the Germans, French, Americans, Russians, and even Belgians began their own colonial endeavors, Britain’s unchecked freedom faded. British leaders feared the expansionist tendencies of their rivals but also the diplomatic repercussions of their own expansionism. France and Germany, for example, forced Britain to cancel its annexation of Congolese territories in 1894 due to fears of aggressive expansion—Britain was not the only actor in the show. [23] Salisbury’s foreign affairs wing, likewise, was terrified of a Russian incursion in the Persian Gulf and in Ottoman territory. By the advent of “Splendid Isolation,” diplomacy was an unsolvable puzzle. Foreign policy had to be constantly adjusted to avoid conflict, which would exhaust Britain’s imperial energies, while simultaneously preventing Britain’s enemies from acquiring too much power of their own.[24] Parliament dedicated innumerable debates to the perfection of the balancing act of diplomacy.[25]
The phrase “Splendid Isolation,” like sakoku was not a phrase coined by the leaders who ultimately used it in their rhetoric. Its first recorded use was in 1896 by Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian politician, in support of his mother nation’s foreign policy (Canada was at this time still a colony of Britain). George Joachim Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, was the first member of the imperial government to use the phrase. “Our isolation,” Goschen said later in 1896, “is not an isolation of weakness; it is deliberately chosen, the freedom to act as we choose in any circumstances that arise…we have stood alone in that which is called isolation—our splendid isolation, as one of our colonial friends was good enough to call it.”[26] Additionally, while history often regards Prime Minister Salisbury as the champion of “Splendid Isolation” policy, no historical scholar insisted on this connection until Harbutt Dawson in 1923.[27] Like sakoku, then, this paper treats “Splendid Isolation” not as a truth, but as a subject of debate. To determine if Britain was really “isolated” would be misleading, because it would force a yes-or-no question on a world that was far from black and white. In the end, it does not matter if Britain, or Japan, was truly isolated. Rather, it is the practice of diplomatic reservedness, of hesitation to engage with the foreign world that is key to understanding isolation; what matters is that many people, both inside and outside of the countries, had much to say about each country’s foreign policy. “Splendid Isolation” would ultimately just have been a tool of rhetoric.
Historiography
A survey of the literature suggests that a comparison of British and Japanese isolationism has not been made before. This is both a great boon and a curse. This paper bridges the rich historiographies of each of the two countries. The historiography of sakoku Japan is an established field of its own. The historiography specifically on British “Splendid Isolation” is comparatively lacking, but the more general study of British diplomacy, foreign engagement, and particularly imperialism during the pre–Great War period is the subject of great focus in academia. The question is: how can the separate historiographical conversations of Japan and Britain be merged?
Were the countries really “isolated?” This is perhaps the most prominent question in the studies of both sakoku and “Splendid Isolation.” Isolation is a hot word, thrown around both by professional historians and in popular discourse on Japanese history. It is easy to make the assumption that Japan existed in a proud, peaceful, and barbarous state until the Americans arrived in 1853 and “opened them up.” Likewise, labelling British foreign affairs in the 1890s as “isolationist” is a convenient way of packaging history. The word “isolation” implies a seal between interior and exterior that is absolute. But to what extent was each country’s “isolation” absolute? This question drives historian Ronald Toby’s analysis in his book, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan. In what many Japanese historians consider to be the treatise on disproving the myth of complete seclusion, Toby argues that Japan was only “isolated” from a Western perspective. The Japanese government may have refused any and all diplomacy, trade, and influence from all Western peoples except the Dutch; but as Toby claims, the Japanese were in constant and essential interaction with the native Ainu people in the north, Ryukyu to the south, and Korea and particularly China to the west. It was the China market that was Japan’s perhaps most lucrative source of income, and it was China and Korea through which the Japanese acquired much of their culture (Buddhism and Confucianism) and also their scientific and medicinal practices.[28]
It is established that Japan had long been shaped by the economies, cultures, and philosophies of its neighbors. However, the subject of this BA thesis is not so much the relatively static cultural and economic exchange that Japan had with its immediate neighbors throughout the sakoku period, but rather Japan’s reactions to the intense and potentially destabilizing ebb and flow of outside pressures that rose specifically during the last 50 years of sakoku. On this subject, this thesis engages with the work of Robert Hellyer, author of Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts 1640-1868.[29] Hellyer tries to understand the complex and ever-globalizing world of the early nineteenth century through the Japanese lens, asking: how did the Japanese react when Russian soldiers landed in the north during the first years of the 1800s? What pressures did the government feel as more European ships began to appear on the horizon, and how did they deal with these pressures? The questions that Hellyer introduces compose the fundamental conversation that this BA paper will expand on. Grant Goodman’s Japan and the Dutch 1600-1853 is also key to understanding Japan’s relations with the only Europeans allowed on Japanese soil, and how this drove Japanese understanding of the world.[30] Christopher Howe’s The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy will likewise help this paper place Japan in the globalizing network of 19th century trade.[31] This paper will also address the ways in which Japan chose to engage with the outside world in ways historians often forget: namely, the successive expansions and retractions of Japanese political domination into the northern island of Ezo, or Hokkaido as it is now known. Ann Irish’s and Brett Walker’s respective histories of Japanese interaction with Hokkaido will be the jumping-off point for this paper’s understanding of a region that was not quite a colony, but not quite not a colony either.[32] The historiography of Japan is, appropriately, nearly as complex as the history itself.
Unlike sakoku, an important contextual (if misunderstood) ideology in many early modern Japanese histories, discussions of “Splendid Isolation” in British historiography are often relegated to a paragraph, snuck in by a distracted author with no intention of any real analysis. There are two books in particular which tell the story of British foreign policy as dramatically as they do scholastically: Historian Christopher Henry Durham Howard’s “Splendid Isolation”, and Historian John Charmley’s “Splendid Isolation?” Both these texts, like Toby’s and Hellyer’s, aim to understand and deconstruct the myth of isolationism; for this, they are invaluable. Unlike Toby’s and Hellyer’s works, which have their own biases, Howard and Charmley both treat British diplomacy during “Splendid Isolation” as a story of a few characters. Howard, in particular, maintains a very obvious reverence for Lord Salisbury, three-time Prime Minister of Great Britain during the 1890s into the early 1900s. Salisbury was regarded as the champion of isolationism as often by his contemporaries as he is by historians. Howard’s work sometimes reads as a character defense of Salisbury, and it is difficult not to regard the Prime Minister as a lovable protagonist by the end of the book. Charmley’s book, while much more comprehensive and less overtly biased, still plays up the “characters” and their personalities as much as he does the historical implications of their actions. This is not to say that these texts are not important to understanding the ideologies and personalities that affected foreign policy during “Splendid Isolation,” but rather, that a more critical analysis of their understudied subject is necessary.
Much of the rest of the historiography on late nineteenth century Great Britain does not address “Splendid Isolation” so directly, but instead discusses specific aspects of British foreign engagement that directly or indirectly pertain to that “isolation.” Perhaps the most studied piece of that engagement is imperialism. By the 1890s, the British Empire was by far the largest empire in the contemporary world, encompassing Canada, India, Australia, parts of East Asia, and much of southern Africa. But Britain’s global prominence meant that, at every turn, the government had a new rival to face down: Russia, Germany, France, China, America, the Ottomans, or various smaller states. The Empire has been the subject of a number of historical works, some scornful, some ambivalent, and some positively revisionist. A veritable Bible for the study of British imperialism, The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century is not, as the title may suggest, a shallow encyclopedic history of a long period. It is rather a collection of essays authored by a variety of experts on specific subjects (such as the mid-century Opium Wars against China, or the Boer War in 1899). This text will is an invaluable point of entry into a variety of different sub-conversations about British engagement in the nineteenth century. William Langler’s The Diplomacy of Isolation and Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire also enter revealing, if often controversial, conversations about the benefits and the necessities of imperialism and foreign engagement. David Krein’s The Last Palmerston Government: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and the Genesis Of “Splendid Isolation” and Stephen Lee’s Aspects of British Political History 1815-1914 both comprise broader overviews of the British political state and its diplomatic efforts, and they both engage in history that is more similar to Hellyer’s and Toby’s country-wide approaches than to Charmley’s and Howard’s character-specific discourses.
Sources
The remainder of this paper is broken into three component parts, each focusing on a different aspect of the rationale and actions of each country’s foreign engagement: First, the ideologies behind seclusion, second, the practical motivations for isolationist policy, and third, the historical traditions and geographic realities that gave each country’s diplomacy an a priori isolationist color. Each of these sections will feature subsections focusing on the contemporary discussion and rhetoric.
The Japanese government had a country to defend and an autonomy to maintain. This paper aims to show the incredible care but also the great fear and anger with which the Japanese dealt with foreigners, and foreign pressures. Robert Hellyer’s Defining Engagement is perhaps the quintessential text for this paper’s understanding of Japanese diplomacy. One of the key subjects of the book is what Hellyer terms “guarded engagement,” which encompasses the ideologies and practical reasons behind Japan’s refusal to establish relations with European powers and more general self-distancing from the rest of the world. Hellyer shows that Japan had felt foreign powers simply did not possess resources valuable enough to warrant the opening of trade and diplomatic relations. But more importantly, Hellyer argues that Japan, and particularly the Japanese government, perceived themselves as having a long tradition of isolation. And the narrative around this “tradition” forms a large part of this paper’s argument. Additionally, this self-perceived “tradition” is perhaps the most obvious way in which the Japanese case of isolation connects directly to British isolation; the defenders of “Splendid Isolation” also championed the narrative of isolation tradition. Of course, it is the irresponsible historian who bases his argument off of one book. Hellyer’s work is primarily a jumping off point for a more detailed understanding of reactionary discourse in Japan. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi’s Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan gives an incredibly detailed understanding of specific anti-foreign reactions and rhetoric during the period of this paper’s focus. Noell Wilson’s Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan likewise approaches defense and reactionary rhetoric from the lens of militarism, which must be taken into account particularly for the physical and policy changes the country experienced in reaction to foreign military pressures.
The primary source base for reactionary rhetoric and discourse during the last decades of sakoku show a Japanese government that is for the most part profoundly disdainful of foreigners, but which is also unsure of how to deal with those foreigners. We have Aizawa Seishisai’s New Theses of 1825, the subject of Wakabayashi’s book but also an important source in their own right. Seishisai outlines the complex nature of Japanese perceptions and relations with foreign powers: according to Seishisai, on the one hand, foreigners were barbarous capitalists who could not be trusted by any self-respecting Japanese. On the other hand, particularly Western European powers provided a model of political strength but also political unity from which Seishisai believed the Japanese administration could learn a great deal. There are also statements made minister of foreign defense, Tokugawa Nariaki, and by other prominent officials in 1853, in immediate reaction to the calamitous arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, but which also outline the general anti-foreign ideological tenets of the sakoku period. This paper will also make use of statements made by the Japanese government and lower officials in reaction to various incursions, primarily by the Russians, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as the Isolation Edict of 1825, issued by the Bakufu and commanding all foreigners who land on Japanese soil to be arrested or killed. All of these sources speak both to the fear of foreigners but also to the perceived need for ideological hardening that the Japanese government championed, and these will be some of this paper’s key narratives.
Britain, like Japan, had an island nation to defend. But in addition to the British Isles, Great Britain also had to contend with every one of the myriad territorial holdings which they possessed across the world. And the reaction to all the foreign pressures Britain faced comes up with equal prevalence in analyses of the Empire as in analyses of Britain’s more direct engagement in the diplomatic sphere of Europe. The defense of the empire is what drives both pro-isolationists and anti-isolationists, as both historians Christopher Howard and John Charmley argue; and the constant debates and in-fighting between these two groups compose just as important a piece of the argument of this BA paper. This paper aims to understand the motivations and ideologies behind the decisions the British government makes. The Empire was on every British politician’s mind during the 1890s; the question this paper aims to address is, why and how? These questions are readily compared with the Japanese case.
As in the case with Japan, the British primary source base for reactionary rhetoric and discourse on foreign engagement is quite broad. Parliamentary debates, all of which have been recorded and are easily accessible, give an insight into the justifications and arguments that British politicians made for isolation, for anti-isolation, and for more general defense. Understanding of the actual policies will be necessary for this paper. Far more colorful, on the other hand, are the innumerable letters, speeches, and short quips that British political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists made during the period of “Splendid Isolation.” There are many examples of this rhetoric, from Prime Minister Salisbury’s statements on Britain’s tradition of isolation, to a comment made by Queen Victoria on the danger of isolation, to belligerent anti-isolationist Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain’s various speeches on the need for cooperation with and aggression against foreign powers to maintain British hegemony. [33] The collection of speeches, articles, and letters from this period continue ad nauseum, and this paper’s greatest feat will be to narrow them down to a useable number. This paper does not aim to be a study of emotions and personal feelings; rather, it aims to understand more broadly the complex motivations behind the decisions made to defend Great Britain and its empire. These examples give the modern scholar an understanding not just of rhetoric, but of the personal and imperial ideology and emotions that drove the diplomatic current of the period of “Splendid Isolation.”
Is this paper primarily about isolation, or about engagement? The two are inextricably linked. By comparing and contrasting the motivations, ideologies and actions of each country’s foreign engagement, we as historians can achieve a greater understanding of what it means for a country, a nation, a people, to be isolated. And this is a subject that enjoys as much prominence today as it did two centuries ago. In our contemporary, highly globalized society, it remains impossible to ignore the rhetoric of anti-foreignism yet championed by Britain and Japan, but also by most if not all nations across the world. Why would a country want to isolate itself? For the purposes of this paper, the answers are divided into two overlapping categories: ideological and practical.
Purity and Peerlessness: Ideological Motivations for Isolation
The overarching rhetoric in Japan put forth by political scholars and government officials during the Tokugawa period was that foreigners were undesirable. This does not mean that no one in Japan liked foreigners and foreign ideas: in addition to the large number of agrarian workers who probably did not think much about foreigners at all, many Japanese studied foreign ideas, medicines, and sciences in Chinese, Korean, and Dutch writings throughout the 250 years of Tokugawa rule. Much of the political philosophy of the Tokugawa government stemmed from Confucian or neo-Confucian ideas of hierarchy and class structure, so the study of such ideas was not particularly contentious.[34] Studies of Dutch literature, however, were often much more controversial. The Dutch were the only link any interested Japanese person had to the broader field of Western science and philosophy. But the study of Dutch learning (known as Rangaku in Japanese) was divisive and could be dangerous if not performed in a manner in keeping with tradition. According to Goodman, while rangaku scholars were allowed to study Dutch science, they could only do so insofar as it related to Sino-Japanese philosophy. In an academia that was sponsored nearly entirely by the government, scholars who diverged from traditional philosophy risked defunding, unemployment, or worse.[35] Despite the presence of foreign ideas and scholars of those ideas, these ideas were not the norm in government practice and philosophy.
The ideological norm in government practice and philosophy was, in fact, to reject—or at least distrust—foreigners and their ideas. Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863), prominent scholar and author of the anti-foreign New Theses of 1825, traces his perceived ideological corruption of the Japanese spirit by foreign ideas to the beginning of history. “Amaterasu’s moral precepts,” Aizawa says, have long “been disrupted by shaman cultists, transformed into something alien by Buddhist clerics, and debated by perverse Confucians and petty men of letters.” [36] It is surprising that, while most of the New Theses deal exclusively with the threat posed to Japan by Western Christians, Aizawa believes that Japan had already been irreversibly corrupted by foreigners a millennium or more before the first Christians arrived in Japan.[37] He continues, “because such wicked doctrines were so diverse and contradictory, they destroyed the people’s spiritual unity [achieved in antiquity by Amaterasu]. Loyalty of subject for ruler and affection between parent and child are now utterly ignored.” Aizawa identifies a golden age, before contact with insidious foreign ideas, when Japan was pure and its people loyal and loving. Aizawa’s beliefs nevertheless left little room for compromise. If foreigners were responsible for the destruction of the very foundations of a person’s ideals, one would not expect that person to turn around and embrace foreigners unconditionally. And while not everyone in Japan followed Aizawa’s teachings, it is nevertheless the case that Aizawa was not alone in his seminal distrust of the forces at work outside and surrounding Japan. His writings would go on to influence not only the Mito intellectual school in which he participated, but also Japanese nationalist thought for decades to come. His ideology, while not directly mentioning isolationism, championed the rejection of foreigners and the need for a greater Japanese unity against the world’s “barbarians,” two tenets that overlap heavily with isolationist philosophy.
If Aizawa Seishisai longed for a strong and unified Japan whose superiority was untainted by interactions with outside entities, Wilfred Laurier, leader of the Canadian Liberal party in 1896, believed Great Britain had already attained that perfect status.[38] When asked what he thought of Britain’s “isolation” at a debate on February 5, 1896, Laurier responded, “For my part, I think splendid, because this isolation of England comes from her superiority, and her superiority today seems to be manifest. In everything that makes a people great, in colonizing power, in trade and commerce, in all the higher arts of civilization, England not only excels all other nations of the modern world, but all nations in ancient history as well.”[39] Where Aizawa saw modern Japan as the subject of a cacophony of insidious foreign influences, Laurier saw Britain as the prime influencing agent of the world. Aizawa laments his Japan for being acted upon, and Laurier lauds his Britain for acting. In essence, Laurier is arguing that 1896 Britain excelled so much at everything that the nation found itself in a kind of natural isolation stemming from its peerlessness. It is important, of course, to keep in mind the context of this speech. The rhetoric of imperialism had reached a fevered pitch amongst white British subjects in the 1890s, and Laurier’s nationalist speech can be read as an appeal to the voracious jingoism of the voting populace—Laurier gave the speech, after all, at a public debate for the prime ministerial election that would be held the following summer. Laurier, as mentioned earlier, identifies a connection between isolation and power of influence—two concepts that at first seem at odds. But are they really at odds? And did those in support of isolation in Japan also want their country to enter into a state of isolation-cum-global power?
In the 1850s, prominent daimyo (domanial lord) Tokugawa Nariaki envisioned a Japan with a similar global position to Laurier’s Great Britain. Nariaki was in charge of addressing and repelling foreign incursions when American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 with a letter from United States President Millard Fillmore. The letter demanded that the Japanese open a port to trade with the Americans and, reminding the Japanese readers of the “powerful squadron” with which Perry arrived, did not provide the Japanese government with the option to decline.[40] Perry and the Japanese did not come to blows, and Perry promised to return a year later once the Japanese had made their decision. Tokugawa Nariaki gave a speech to the Japanese government on August 14, 1853 (a month after Perry’s first visit) in which he outlined the ten reasons for which Japan could not and should not ever submit peacefully to the Americans. Nariaki, responsible for the defense of Japan against external threats, was vehemently opposed to the prospect of foreign powers influencing Japan. He, like Aizawa, saw nineteenth-century Japan as being on a downward spiral into corruption. In his address, Nariaki stated, “if the people of Japan stand firmly united, if we complete our military preparations and return to the state of society that existed before the middle ages [when the emperor ruled the country directly], then we will even be able to go out against foreign countries and spread abroad our fame and prestige.”[41] Nariaki does not expand on his views of “ideal” Japan in this speech, but it appears that, like Aizawa, he wanted some form of reversion to what he saw as a more unified, unique Japanese polity. And, he sees this strong and independent polity as a stepping stone towards Japan’s rightful world domination. This is an unadulterated imperialist statement; Nariaki very clearly wanted a Japan that occupied a similar status as Laurier’s Great Britain in the 1890s (although 1853 Nariaki was clearly not using 1896 Britain as a reference point). While Nariaki (d. 1860) did not live long enough to witness the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan would go on to become a powerful empire in the decades after the Restoration. [42] The nationalist beliefs he championed about the renewal of the emperor’s power and Japanese global authority became the defining, often jingoist, tenets of Japanese government philosophy during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) and beyond.
At first, it seems nonsensical that a country could be a world power while still upholding an isolationist foreign policy. Were Laurier, Nariaki, and Aizawa all conceiving of a union of two ideas that was fundamentally impossible? It seems unlikely; all three would probably argue that, at least for their own countries, global power by nature requires a kind of isolation. The confusion, then, lies in the nebulousness of the word isolation, a word which this entire paper is trying to define. Let us, then, continue to develop a definition as the Japanese and British would have had it. First Lord of the British Admiralty George Joachim Goschen spoke “to a Conservative crowd” on February 26, 1896, in which he outlined the conceptions he and his party members had of the definition of isolation.[43] This speech came less than a month after Laurier indirectly coined the term “Splendid Isolation.” Goschen begins, “There may be the isolation of those who are weak and who therefore are not courted because they can contribute nothing, and there is, on the other hand, the isolation, of those who do not wish to be entangled in any complications and will hold themselves free in every respect.”[44] Isolation, thus, can be divided into two categories; first, what Goschen would call “unintentional,” and secondly, what he would call “intentional.” There is an aspect of pragmatism to these forms of isolation that will be discussed later, but Goschen’s statement on Britain’s isolation in particular is strongly ideological. “Our isolation,” he says, is not an isolation of weakness; it is deliberately chosen, the freedom to act as we choose in any circumstances that arise… [while other powers] barter favour for favour, promise for promise… we have stood alone in that which is called isolation—our splendid isolation, as one of our colonial friends was good enough to call it.[45] There is a notable insecurity in Goschen’s repetition that Britain’s isolation is, really, intentional and good. Goschen appears to be trying to convince his audience that British prestige has not fallen by the wayside. Goschen’s own image of Britain is clear: towering and ivory. Britain, above all nations, has the privilege of freedom, and this freedom comes entirely from isolation. In a sense, they are one in the same for Goschen’s Britain. If Britain were not powerful, it would need the diplomatic support of other nations, thereby breaking both its isolation and its freedom of action. It is Britain’s isolation-cum-freedom that makes the country great, and it is the country’s greatness that allows Britain to engage in such a manner. This is the self-fulfilling cycle of nationalism that both Laurier and Nariaki preached.
It is difficult to distinguish “ideological” from “practical” motivations for isolation. For example, Robert Hellyer says “We see a Tokugawa regime making decisions based not upon ideology but rather a series of agendas related to the governance of the Japanese realm: the need to assure the flow of goods through Nagasaki, to sustain a ‘Japan-centered world’ in diplomacy, as well as to gain intelligence as part of defending the realm.”[46] Commerce and defense are doubtless more practical motivations for Japan’s tight foreign policy. However, Hellyer’s statement, that the desire for a “Japan-centered world” is entirely without ideological patronage, is dubious. Even if it were miraculously the case that no one in Tokugawa Japan felt that their homeland was ontologically superior and therefore deserved to be at the center of the “world” (however Hellyer wants to define “world” in this context), it would be impossible to prove and even more dangerous to assume. But in history, we have to run under the assumption that those we study are humans; emotions affect actions, and altruism is the exception, not the mean. For Hellyer to make the blanket statement that the Tokugawa did not operate on any basis of ideology is as worrisome as for older, more Euro-centric scholars to assume Japan’s foreign policy was based entirely on ideological, unreasonable bounds.
It is also dangerous to set up a spectrum of quality based on the practicality of a country’s foreign policy: a spectrum that Hellyer hints at in his assurance that the Tokugawa policy was based only on pragmatic agendas. Are we to assume that, if a country does in fact base their foreign policy on ideology, they are a lower form of civilization than a country that leaves ideology out of global affairs? Not at all; in fact, it is entirely idealistic to believe that a country could ever separate emotions from diplomacy. Historian Christopher Howard, author of Splendid Isolation, points out that “it is significant and can hardly have been a coincidence that talk of Britain’s ‘isolation’ as a matter of deliberate choice became fashionable within a few months of it being generally realized that France and Russia had come together.”[47] Howard’s use of the word “fashion” here is important; it reduces the discourse on foreign policy to a kind of trendiness based on a cycle of human feeling and reaction. Even Laurier’s perfect Britain is insecure enough that its populace looks for reasons to justify the fact that they were left out of continental alliance treaties. Britain’s “Splendid Isolation,” in a sense, was just a reactionary ideological measure to counteract what many British believed to be a diplomatic affront on Britain’s perceived ontological superiority.
Where the line between ideological and practical foreign policy becomes particularly thin in Japan is in the concept of ideological unity within a country. A discussion of this unity can be divided into two categories of questions: first, what is ideological unity, and second, why is ideological unity necessary and how did foreign influence threaten it? The first question will be addressed now, and the second and third will be addressed as practical motivations for isolation later.
Tokugawa Nariaki, in his speech on the need to repel foreigners in 1853, says the following: “I hear that all, even though they be commoners, who have witnessed the recent actions of the foreigners, think them abominable.”[48] Unity, then, lies fundamentally in the beliefs of the commoners. The commoners are the limbs of the country, and they above all else must be in sync in their beliefs with the government, the brain of the country. But capitally important in Nariaki’s mind is that the commoners specifically seem to be in agreement in their feelings toward Matthew Perry and other foreigners who had previously attempted to force themselves on Japan. Nariaki continues, saying “It is inevitable that men should think in this way when they have seen how arrogantly the foreigners acted at Uraga. That, I believe, is because even the humblest are conscious of the debt they owe their country, and it is indeed a promising sign.”[49] Unity and hatred of foreigners, in Nariaki’s mind, are inextricably linked. This is of course in large part because Nariaki himself did not like foreigners and foreign influences, but it says a lot about the concepts of isolation more generally. If common people don’t follow the doctrine of foreigner repulsion, then the country itself will be unable to follow that doctrine; Tokugawa Japan was only as strong as its weakest link. But it is curious that Nariaki identifies the compliance of the common people with debt-paying. This suggests that he sees little agency in them other than as a member of a business transaction, as though the common people are only agreeing to help because the government itself is doing the cerebral work and decision-making. This is not an unfamiliar concept in governance, particularly knowing that Nariaki was the government-appointed official on managing foreigner repulsion. But the idea that the people are just paying their debts suggests that the only entity who cares a priori about the repulsion of foreigners is the government itself, whereas isolation may be more a fact of life than a conscious decision on the part of non-governmental entities.[50]
Japanese and British administrators alike displayed a cornucopia of biases and personal beliefs which are key to understanding the formation of isolationist foreign policy. Governments are inseparable from ideology—from feeling—because they are composed entirely of individuals who feel and idealize. It would be supremely difficult to find a country in the twenty-first century, or in the nineteenth century, or any other, that did not engage in diplomacy that was based on the ideals of its rulers. Whether governing individuals want what is best for themselves, for their state, or for their people, we can safely say they always desire something. It is from this desire that ideology grows and shapes itself. And it is from this desire that isolation, in any of its forms, can spring.
Tradeoffs and Rejections: Practical Motivations for Isolation
We have now seen the ideological motivations of isolation in Japan and Britain that are, in many cases, quite similar despite the very different roles and worlds each country occupies. But while ideology is similar, the difference in these worlds becomes much more obvious when comparing each country’s practical motivations for isolation. Britain, having substantial pieces of its empire located on every continent except Antarctica by the 1890s, experienced a pressure on its borders and foreign policy rather incomparable to that pressure experienced by the relatively tiny Japan. The British Isles, just a short boat ride away from all of the rapidly industrializing powers of Europe, felt threats to their existence quite unlike the Japanese archipelago, whose only neighbors were the ever-weakening Qing empire and the rare Russian outpost on the coasts of northeast Asia. Yet, the differences may not be quite as stark as they seem. Both Britain and Japan relied on their nature as island nations for defense. In addition, the leaders of Japan and Britain approached engagement with foreign nations cautiously because both questioned whether whatever good could come from trade or diplomatic relationships was worth the risk of foreign entanglements. This is not to say, however, that British and Japanese “isolation” policy played out in comparable forms, but merely for a similar reason. Let us now turn to the actual forms of practical isolation in each country, that we may understand their reasoning.
As we saw earlier, Japanese leaders’ desire for ideological (or perhaps “spiritual”) unity in their people was not always based on a simple hatred of foreign influences on moral grounds. To the contrary, Japanese statesmen saw a real, palpable threat in even the most pacific of foreign advances; particularly, in the proselytization of Christianity by Europeans. In his New Theses of 1825, Aizawa Seishisai says, “the Portuguese came to Kyushu to propagate Christianity and to incite our stupid masses to revolt, but they converted certain daimyo such as Otomo Sorin and Konishi Yukinaga as well.[51] Oda Nobunaga himself erected a church to their god in Kyoto and invited barbarian clerics to preach there.”[52] Aizawa identifies here one danger of foreign influence: unrest among the “stupid” commoners. While Aizawa’s apparent disdain for the masses may be exaggerated, the danger he addresses is not.
The success the European (primarily Jesuit) missionaries from Portugal and Spain experienced led to a great panic amongst Japanese administrators who feared the cultural and spiritual divisions brewing in their country. This culminated in the passing of the Edict of 1635 Ordering the Closing of Japan, which, as discussed before, had a profound effect on Japanese diplomacy for the next 200 years. But, according to Aizawa, the Jesuits were not violently disruptive in their missionary work—they were quite the opposite. “The barbarians quickly proceeded to comfort and care for the needy and distressed,” Aizawa says, “in an effort to capture our people’s hearts and minds. When Oda Nobunaga perceived their ulterior motives, he vowed to destroy the church in Kyoto and eradicate all clerics from the land.”[53] The danger of Christianity may not be as overt as a military invasion, but Japanese leaders throughout the Tokugawa period continued to believe that western religion threatened Japan’s very existence as a nation.
Although many Japanese still feared the effects of Christianity, in the nineteenth century, foreign religion was not their only cause for concern. The Qing government outlawed the trade of opium in China in 1839. The British, having been deprived of one of the most lucrative markets for the drug, attacked Chinese ports and ships, beginning the First Opium War of 1839-1842. The Japanese shogunate watched from a distance as the revered and invincible Qing crumbled under the superior firepower and naval technology of the British. The danger posed by militant Westerners became infinitely clearer. Even William II, king of the Dutch and leader of the only Western country allowed to trade in Japan, saw the threat posed by his fellow Europeans to Japanese livelihood. William II sent a letter to shogun Tokugawa Iesada, warning him that disasters such as the Qing defeat by the British in the opium war of 1839-1842 “now threaten the Japanese Empire. A mere mischance might precipitate a conflict. The number of all sorts of vessels sailing the Japanese seas will be greater than ever before, and how easily might a quarrel occur between the crews of those vessels and the inhabitants of Your Majesty’s Dominion.”[54] William pinpoints the Japanese fear of Westerners and Western incursion that had been escalating for the previous 50 years; any ship on the horizon, some believed, could spell the end for Japan.
William wrote this letter in an effort to convince the Japanese to open their ports to foreigners so as to avoid being forced to do so like the Chinese. But the Japanese government saw the Opium War in a different light: having witnessed the destructive power of the British, many Japanese officials felt even more inclined toward rigorous anti-Western defense initiatives than before. Tokugawa Nariaki himself, in his speech on resisting Westerners in 1853, outlines the “repeated blunder” East Asian countries had historically made by allowing Europeans to get “a foothold by means of trade and then go to propagate Christianity and make other unreasonable demands.”[55] The premier modern example of this, according to Nariaki, was the Opium War. “We must never choose the policy of peace” toward Western arrivals, Nariaki says, because of the lessons learned from the Opium War.[56]
Whereas the Japanese spent much of the early nineteenth century attempting to deal with increasing foreign incursions in and around their archipelago, the “splendidly isolated” British in the 1890s stood atop the veritable peak of their empire.[57] This difference becomes quite apparent in British diplomatic discussions. Japan was small, and the British Empire was large. The Earl of Rosebery, prime minister of Britain from 1892-1895, makes this clear in his response to demands that Britain intervene in the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895.[58] Rosebery stated that the guiding principle of Britain’s refusal to intervene in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, and Britain’s own protection of Shanghai, “is the same: we cannot embroil ourselves in the quarrels of others unless our own interests imperatively demand it. Imperatively, I say, because our commerce is so universal and so penetrating that scarcely any question can arise in any part of the world without involving British interests.”[59] Britain’s fundamental problem, according to Rosebery, is not its weakness but its greatness. Nothing in the world happened that doesn’t involve Britain, Britain was everywhere. But why is this a problem? Rosebery continues that the consideration of the empire’s omnipresence, “instead of widening rather circumscribes the field of our action. For did we not strictly limit the principle of intervention we should always be simultaneously engaged in some forty wars.”[60] Where Tokugawa Nariaki feared the increasing presence of foreigners around Japan, Rosebery feared the effects of Britain’s presence all over the world. This is not to say that Rosebery did not particularly fear the other strong nations of the world like Russia or France. But, if Britain did not limit their intervention, the strength of any one nation would not matter, because according to Rosebery, Britain would be at war with all of them. The British Empire was spread quite thin, and although this reach was the source of great power and wealth, it also caused great concern in the minds of those who had to govern it. In this sense, even if Britain could have benefited from intervening in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the potential resulting diplomatic instability would far outweigh the benefits.[61]
The heart of “Splendid Isolation” lies in Britain’s general refusal to form any military alliances during the late nineteenth century. Lord Salisbury, prime minister from 1886-1892 and again from 1895-1902, greatly feared the permanently binding effects of alliances. After the signing of the Franco-Russian Entente in 1893, the alliance of France with Russia and the pre-existing Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria, and Italy loomed large over Britain.[62] But although Salisbury wanted “a closer relation with Germany,” as he said to statesmen Joseph Chamberlain in 1896, the prime minister always resisted true alliance forming. In 1902, with the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance on the horizon, he would still not relent. The alliance involved a “pledge on our part,” Salisbury said, “to defend Japanese action in Korea and in all China against France and Russia, no matter what the casus belli may be. There is no limit: and no escape. We are pledged to war, though the conduct of our ally may have been followed in spite of our strongest remonstrances, and may be avowedly regarded by us with clear disapprobation.”[63] The alliance, according to Salisbury, was fundamentally a tradeoff of freedom for power, in which Britain would have no choice but to follow Japan blindly into war.[64] To the extent that one could call Salisbury the “champion” of “Splendid Isolation,” the debate over the benefits of alliance composed the battlefield on which he fought. Not once, as far as the historiography shows, did Salisbury actively pursue an alliance, in a time when ever other great power was scrambling for one. The tradeoff, in his eyes, was far too costly.
This is not to say, however, that Salisbury and his contemporaries did not experience enormous pressure to relent and join an alliance. A good deal of this pressure came from other great powers. Otto von Bismarck (d. 1898) spent much of his later years trying to persuade the British to join the Triple Alliance, knowing that doing so would greatly increase Germany’s power over Britain’s fate.[65] Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany also wanted Salisbury to join for the same reasons. In a letter to Queen Victoria in 1896, Salisbury even wagered that “the Emperor has really been trying… to frighten England into joining the Triple Alliance.” But most of the pressure came from inside Britain; not everyone agreed with Salisbury’s diplomacy. Joseph “Jingo Joe” Chamberlain, Salisbury’s Colonial Secretary, never shied from expressing his beliefs that Britain’s isolation, as he perceived it, was destroying the country.[66] Liberal statesman and parliament member Sir William Harcourt, in a parliamentary debate on policy in the East, said “I believe the time for our ‘splendid isolation’ is gone. It was very useful [in the past], but it is not very suitable for the present time, and I believe if the Government of this country would try to make an alliance with Germany that really would make for peace for a very long period… I do not suppose it will be very popular at first, but I believe the enemy we shall have in the future is Russia.”[67] Many British people believed that Salisbury’s dreaded tradeoff would actually be worth it for British diplomacy. Harcourt was not the only statesman who wanted to increase Britain’s defensibility against Russia—particularly with the Russian threat to India and China, many believed the Romanov empire had to be stopped at all costs. For them, trading a little freedom for security was a steal of a bargain, and Salisbury’s refusal to engage was impetuous and dangerous.
The Japanese government, like Salisbury’s, also found themselves pressured by foreign powers to make what they perceived as all-or-nothing tradeoffs. But the Japanese tradeoffs were often of an actual commercial nature. This is given that the British government engaged in world trade and therefore could never choose to reject trade prospects out of hand, while Tokugawa ports were only open to a select few foreigners. The Japanese found themselves increasingly rejecting foreign governments’ repeated trade offers. One of the most well-documented of these rejections was the Rezanov Incident of 1805, in which the Russian envoy Nikolai Rezanov sailed to Japan and requested the opening of commercial contact between the two countries.[68] The Tokugawa government, perhaps surprisingly, did not immediately reject Rezanov. Japanese officials first inquired as to the specifics of Rezanov’s proposed trade agreement: “What productions Russia could and would bring to Japan as objects of trade? Whether Russia would furnish sugar, rye, skins, medicines, and other articles? How many ships she could and would send annually to Japan? Whether four, five, or even more?”[69] According to Robert Hellyer, this obsessive desire for specifics did not result from any insecurity on the Japanese part, but instead from a simple lack of interest in trading. Most Tokugawa officials felt that, unless the Russians had some new or revolutionary good to offer the Japanese, they were not willing to make the tradeoff.
According to one document from the Tokugawa government, however, the government’s unwillingness to make such a trade did not even stem from the potential loss of dignity or freedom. It was simply a matter of weighing numerical costs and benefits. “In the instance of commerce,” the document reads, “it may appear that adding things which your country [Russia] has to those which our country [Japan] lacks would be of mutual benefit… we have concluded that in exchange of foreign items of little value, we would lose useful Japanese goods. All things considered, such trade would not be in the interest of the realm as a whole.”[70] Russian trade, in a very practical sense, was simply not good enough for the Japanese; they determined the tradeoff to be economically disadvantageous. This, of course, is not a revolutionary idea—trades have been refused innumerable times throughout history. But, to return to the introduction of this paper, it is quite easy for a denizen of the hyper-globalized twenty-first century to forget that the world has not always been “global.” This is to say, one takes for granted that all countries are always engaged in trade with all other countries. But 300, or even 200 years ago, this was not nearly as true. While the Dutch or the Spanish may have had fingers in every pie across the globe, most countries did not. The Japanese refusal of Russian trade was not necessarily prideful or backward; they simply made the decision in a relatively pre-global context.[71]
While many agreed that the rejection of Rezanov was acceptable, some did not. Given the autocratic nature of the Tokugawa, those who disagreed usually did not have much sway in the decision-making process. So, it would perhaps be inaccurate to say that the shogun felt pressure to rethink his decision, in the same way that Salisbury felt direct pressure from his subordinates and the masses to rethink his rejection of alliances. But some Japanese certainly disagreed with the bakufu decision.[72] Japanese artist and thinker Shiba Kokan said of the Incident, “The Russian envoy in half a year at Nagasaki was not permitted to land, and besides that replies of the Bakufu were impolite and arrogant.” Rezanov’s treatment, at the very least, was openly inhospitable. Shiba continues, “Rezanov is the envoy of the emperor of that country. Their emperor is the equivalent of our emperor… If one may speak figuratively, it is like acting towards people who dress properly as though they were naked. They will probably think of the Japanese as beasts.”[73] Shiba identifies a number of concerns that people had about the resolution of the incident, namely that it was a great diplomatic faux pas. It is curious that he viewed Russia as a significant diplomatic entity, whereas the government did not. Shiba’s concern for the perception of Japan by other countries is rare. While most documents analyzed in this paper so far treat the world outside of Japan with contempt, distrust, and sometimes condescension, all of these themes are absent from Shiba’s statement. Why does it matter that the Russians will think of the Japanese as beasts? It is hard to know—Shiba could be afraid that the Russians would invade if they saw the Japanese as weak. But his comment about the equal standing of the emperors of the two countries suggests he simply felt it disrespectful and self-defacing on a diplomatic level. Whether or not one believes in diplomatic altruism, he still shows a kind of empathy that is often absent from Japanese government sources.[74] What, then, does this mean for isolation? First of all, it is not a unanimous choice. Secondly, while the Tokugawa rejection of Rezanov came with practical benefits, it came with practical detriments as well, at least according to Shiba’s view. By rejecting a bad tradeoff, the Tokugawa government entered another tradeoff; isolation always comes at a cost.
Regardless of any ideology, policymakers in both Japan and Britain weighed the benefits and costs of diplomatic decisions. On a broad level, we have examined some of the practical reasons why governments in both Japan and Britain chose isolation over openness. But we have also seen that the division between engagement and non-engagement is quite complicated. Japan and Britain were both “isolated,” but their isolations were not equal. The British Empire, at the top of the world hierarchy in military, naval, and technological power, could not seclude itself from the world at large in the same way that Japan did. For the British, the rejection of military alliances generated enough controversy by itself. Relatively speaking, that a world power like Britain did so was considered quite dangerous not only by its peers but by its rivals as well. But for Japan, rejection of military alliances was only the tip of the iceberg; many Japanese wanted to avoid at all costs any interaction at all with foreigners, particularly Europeans. Opening themselves up to diplomatic and commercial interaction was at best unnecessary and at worst, equivalent to the opening of the door for the destructive Christian imperialism of the West. One cannot rank British isolation as better or worse than Japanese, nor can one say which possessed the truer isolation. Each country, in its historical time and geographical location, chose a foreign policy that its leaders determined to be most practical. Both Japan and Britain were aggressively accused of practicing a policy of seclusion that would be fatal, yet their leaders did not relent until forced to do so—Japan by external threats of war and an internal military coup, and Britain by election. Our question, from the beginning to the end, is not “were Japan and Britain isolated?” Such semantics lead nowhere. Our question is, “what did it mean for them to be isolated?” What did their foreign policy look like, during times which we now think of as isolation?
Traditions and Geography of Isolation
Leaders in Japan and Britain did not always choose a policy of isolation. Sometimes, isolation was thrust upon them. Tradition and the expectations to uphold that tradition weighed heavily on the minds of those who governed in both countries. That weight may appear more obvious in the eastern country, given the ubiquity of the Japanese “closed-country” edicts in historical discourse. Tokugawa Nariaki stated that “the expulsion of foreigners is the ancient law of the shogun’s ancestors, reissued and reaffirmed in the Bunsei period (1825),” and that for this reason, “the bakufu has in fact always been firmly resolved to fight off foreigners.”[75] Japanese seclusion, then, had some “ancient” precedent that gives the policy legitimacy. This seclusion had been repeatedly affirmed throughout history, by the emperors of antiquity, by the soldiers who defended Japan from the Mongols in the late thirteenth century, and by shogun throughout the Tokugawa period. Although Nariaki certainly overstates the absoluteness of isolation throughout history; Aizawa Seishisai would probably disagree that Japan had spent the previous centuries at sufficient remove from foreign influences. But Nariaki’s argument that diplomatic pickiness existed before the Tokugawa government is correct. In a similar vein, British statesman Henry Norman likewise said of his own country in 1902 that “the policy of Britain had always been freedom from alliances.”[76] Neither he, nor Prime Minister Salisbury, had full autonomy in choosing their foreign policy. For as long as many people could remember, Britain had kept herself shy of the turmoil of its neighboring continent. “Splendid Isolation” may have only become a fashionable phrase in the 1890s. But its tenets, according to some, had been the core of British diplomacy since the nation’s conception.
British politicians constantly used tradition to justify their foreign policy decisions. This often meant bringing in the tradition argument when the public began to fear for Britain’s international relations. Joseph Chamberlain defended his government’s increasingly unpopular diplomatic seclusionism in 1902, saying, “we have the feeling, unfortunately, that we have to count upon ourselves alone, and I say, therefore, it is the duty of the British people to count upon themselves alone, as their ancestors did. I say alone, yes, in a splendid isolation, surrounded and supported by our kinfolk.”[77] That Chamberlain calls the feeling “unfortunate” is important: he channeled the frustrations politicians and average citizens alike had about Salisbury’s perceived weakness of diplomatic spirit. He felt these frustrations unified the populace. But Chamberlain knew that Britain’s separation from the affairs of Europe was not entirely Britain’s doing. According to historian Robert Stafford, author of “Scientific Exploration and Empire,” the British Empire was increasingly constrained by powers outside its borders throughout the late nineteenth century.[78] As France, Germany, and other continental nations industrialized and expanded their colonial regimes, Britain’s hold on the throne of global hegemony became feebler. In the above speech, Chamberlain characterized this state of affairs not as a sign of weakness, but as a traditional fact of English political life. British people, in his eyes, should not flail their arms about in a desperate attempt to maintain greatness; rather, they should continue on as they always have, out of duty, as members of a country for whom the feeling of being left out is not a new one.
The Japanese government in the early nineteenth century likewise had long felt increasingly constrained by foreign powers. But this constraint came not in the form of limits on international action (the Tokugawa government did not act on an international scale like the British did), but on internal hegemony. Tokugawa Nariaki, responsible for defense against foreign incursions in the last years of the Edo period, knew that his forerunners had been setting a precedent of isolationist policy against Europeans for over 200 years. There had never been a Tokugawa shogunate that allowed outsiders into Japanese diplomacy and to trade at will. So, when it came time for the bakufu to decide whether to acquiesce to Matthew Perry’s demands for trade in 1853, Nariaki felt there was only one answer. In his speech, Nariaki began, “for some years Russia, England, and others have sought trade with us, but the bakufu has not permitted it.” This was not the first time the Japanese had been propositioned. “Should permission be granted to the Americans, on what ground would it be possible to refuse if Russia and the others [again] request it?”[79] By accepting the American demands, Nariaki feared the opening of the floodgates of foreign incursion into Japanese autonomy, which the Tokugawa line had guarded so fervently, would be forced open. In one fell swoop, both the future and past of Japan would be destroyed. Only by keeping with Japanese tradition could Japan be maintained in a stable fashion for the future. Less than a year after Nariaki’s speech, the shogunate signed an agreement opening ports to American merchants. By 1858, all pretense of Japanese commercial autonomy was gone, and all of Nariaki’s hated enemies—“Russia, England, and others”—were sailing in Japanese seas and trading in Japanese markets. Nariaki may have failed in his goal of keeping foreign countries out of Japan. But he was not wrong in his premonitions of the effects of Perry’s demands; indeed, the floodgates were open.
The British government, on the other hand, largely did not fear foreign incursions, at least on the British Isles proper. This fact featured prominently in Salisbury’s rhetoric. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s and into the 1900s, the British government received a number of offers for alliance from German statesmen such as Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Count Hatzfeldt, the German ambassador in London. The Germans wanted Salisbury to join the Triple Alliance in order to pacifistically bend the British to their will, but Salisbury never relented. In a state paper he wrote in May 1901, Salisbury said, “Count Hatzfeldt speaks of our ‘isolation’ as constituting a serious danger for us. Have we ever felt that danger practically? …Except during [Napoleon I’s] reign we have never even been in danger; and, therefore, it is impossible for us to judge whether the ‘isolation’ under which we are supposed to suffer, does or does not contain in it any elements of peril.”[80] Not only, then, has Britain’s traditional policy been one of isolation; according to Salisbury, the Isles have never had to call into question their reserved diplomacy because they have never been threatened to the point of needing an alliance in the first place. Salisbury continues, “It would hardly be wise to incur novel and most onerous obligations, in order to guard against a danger in whose existence we have no historical reason for believing.”[81] No enemy warships roamed British horizons, no squadrons of German troops ever landed on British shores and fought their way inland. Salisbury’s belief in Britain’s utter safety is cocksure at best, yet his words ring true. Even though other European nations had been catching up to the Empire in naval strength, her fleet for the time being remained unchallenged.[82] And with the strongest navy in the world, Salisbury knew his enemies would be hard pressed to launch an offensive on British national territory.
But there was one strength that both Salisbury and the late Tokugawa shoguns inherited that trumped all others: an insular position. Geography has not featured much in this paper; however, it is important to note that neither Britain nor Japan could have achieved the success in diplomatic seclusionism that they did if they were attached by land to Eurasia like their peers.[83] Donald Keene, author of The Japanese Discovery of Europe, calls Japan “blessed geographically.”[84] Engelbert Kaempfer, a German traveler and scientist who paid an extensive visit to Japan in the late 17th century, was stunned by the uniqueness of Japanese geography. He called Japan “a particular World, which Nature seems purposely to have separated from the rest of the Globe, by encompassing it with a rocky and tempestuous Sea,” and remarked that “it can easily subsist of itself without any assistance from foreign countries, as long as Arts and Agriculture are follow’d by the Natives.”[85] Most European visitors during the Tokugawa area immediately determined the country’s foreign policy to be patently absurd.[86] But Kaempfer, a scientist and philosopher, agreed with his hosts that the Japanese could easily afford to maintain an isolationist diplomacy thanks to their physical location. And Japanese leaders knew this as well. The tradition of isolation which Nariaki and other anti-foreign thinkers of the late Tokugawa period promoted was deeply entwined with the archipelago’s immutable separation from the continent. Unlike the Qing, surrounded on all sides by enemies, Japan was alone in its world. The fortification provided by the ocean was greater than any wall.
Salisbury was equally vocal about the advantages the sea provided Britain.[87] He often spoke of his nation’s “insular position.” This, in conjunction with the Imperial Navy, “ma[de] the burdensome conditions of an alliance unnecessary,” according to the prime minister.[88] France or Germany, as continental powers, had constant fear of invasion from their neighboring countries; thus, it became necessary for them to form alliances to ward off potential aggressors. But the defense and relative impassability of the sea made that sea a better ally than any in the Germany’s Triple Alliance. Even the distant Russians knew this. Russian Foreign Minister Aleksey Lobanov commented in 1895,
The situation of Europe has naturally drawn [continental countries] together. Both France and Russia are instinctively social. They are like to travelers along the same road. At first they walk on opposite sides. Then they draw a little nearer together, and begin talking about their mutual concerns. After a little they see three other people walking in the same direction, linked arm in arm. This suspicious attitude brings the two acquaintances into still closer contact, and they also link arms. England is the only Nation that is content to remain in isolation, and the only Nation whose position permits such an attitude. She likes it, and she is proud of it.[89]
Despite his resentment of British aloofness in diplomacy, Lobanov nevertheless appreciated the unique advantage the Isles’ geography gave Britain. No other country in Europe—certainly no country whose strength would ever rival England—possessed such an advantage. This was not a tradition of British policy. It was simply a fact of life, and no parliamentary regime, liberal or conservative, could change that. But its insular position, like Japan’s, influenced diplomacy not just during periods of explicit “isolation,” but throughout each country’s history. Geography, that great isolator, cannot be forgotten.
Conclusion
What is “isolation?” The question is loaded. Tokugawa Nariaki never used the word in his anti-foreign speeches. It does not feature in the Japanese Edicts of 1639. Lord Salisbury treated it as a dirty word, and Queen Victoria herself lamented the concept.[90] Yet the very leaders who disavowed the term also championed a foreign policy that their peers did not hesitate to call isolationist. It may not be fair to equate Tokugawa with Salisburian isolation; it may not even be fair to call either policy isolation. But it is imperative to break the nebulous and mystifying word down to its component parts—to make it more specific, more concrete—because this is how confusing concepts are rendered less so. Autonomy, aggressive neighbors, lack of desire for foreign goods, convenient geography, discomfort with foreign practices and values: these are all facets of isolation discussed in this paper. But whether each individual one makes a country isolated is not relevant, because that is semantics. What matters is why a country’s leaders would choose such policies, or why they would champion such beliefs. Why did the British vote to “Brexit” in June 2016 and leave the EU and the refugees behind? Maintenance of tradition, combined with a desire for unfettered autonomy combined with a geographic separation from the continent historically drive British seclusionism. Why is present-day Japan experiencing a veritable population crisis coupled with a continued disdain for immigration? An institutional distrust of outsiders, combined with the prioritization of national values and again a geographic distance from other nations have long given Japanese foreign affairs an isolationist edge. The ideologies and realities of the 21st-century nation’s policy lies in history—their history of isolation.
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[1] Christopher Henry Durham Howard, Splendid Isolation: A Study of Ideas Concerning Britain’s International Position and Foreign Policy During the Later Years of the Third Marquis Of Salisbury (New York: Macmillan; St. Martin’s, 1967), 94. Rosebery in Liverpool, on Lansdowne’s ‘recantation,’ February 14 1902.
[2] The rather nebulous phrase “foreign entanglements,” out of the mouths of late 19th century British statespeople, usually referred specifically to the avoidance of military alliances and/or military interventions in the affairs of other European powers. It does not mean that they abandoned the colonies that formed their rather large empire.
[3] Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Stanford: Stanford University, 1991), 12.
[4] David J. Lu, Japan: A Documentary History: V. 1: The Dawn of History to the Late Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 221.
[5] Lu, Japan, 221.
[6] See a discussion of Britain in China and the Opium Wars of the 1840s later in this paper.
[7] Toby, State and Diplomacy, 12.
[8] Ibid., 11
[9] Ibid, 12
[10] Ibid, 13
[11] The Chinese Ming dynasty was overthrown in the early 17th century by Manchu tribes from the north, who come to rule much of modern-day China for nearly three centuries.
[12] More on this useful term and concept later.
[13] Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 74. Satsuma was a powerful Japanese province that would later go on to orchestrate the overthrow of the Tokugawa government and catalyze the Meiji Restoration.
[14] Hellyer, Defining, 174.
[15] Ibid., 106.
[16] Ibid., 172
[17]Grant K. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch 1600-1853 (London: Routledge, 2014), 205.
[18] Via the edicts put forth by the Tokugawa government in the 1630s.
[19] Goodman, Japan, 16.
[20] Ibid., 30.
[21] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 93.
[22] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 30.
[23] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 2.
[24] Andrew Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (OUP Oxford, 2001), 435.
[25] “HANSARD 1803–2005,” Archive, Commons and Lords Hansard, accessed October 11, 2016, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/index.html.
[26] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 22.
[27] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 70
[28] Marius B. Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
[29] Hellyer, Defining
[30] Goodman, Japan
[31] Christopher Howe, The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy: Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[32] Irish, Walker respectively
[33] Howard, Splendid Isolation.
[34] Though the subject of Confucian medicine and philosophy in Japan is indeed fascinating.
[35] There were exceptions to this, and many people studied Dutch writing for its own sake in underground academic circles. These will be discussed later.
[36] Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 168. Amaterasu is the goddess of the sun according to Shinto mythology. She helped create Japan and was an ancestor of emperor Jimmu, the semi-mythical first emperor of Japan from whom all subsequent Japanese emperors, including the 21st century’s Emperor Akihito, trace their descent.
[37] Buddhism arrived in Japan through Korea in the 6th century A.D. Aizawa’s “shaman cultists” presumably had been around for longer.
[38] Canada was still fully a part of the British Empire at this point.
[39] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 17. This was the first recorded reference to Britain’s isolation as “splendid.” Laurier, in a sense, coined the term “Splendid Isolation” which we now apply to Britain’s foreign affairs during the 1890s and early 1900s.
[40] Millard Filmore, LETTERS FROM U.S. PRESIDENT MILLARD FILLMORE AND U.S. NAVY COMMODORE MATTHEW C. PERRY TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN (1852 – 1853), (Columbia University)http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/fillmore_perry_letters.pdf, accessed 4/2/2017. Various foreign powers like the Russians, British, and Americans had been trying to establish commercial and diplomatic relations with Japan during the first 50 years of the 19th century.
[41] Lu, Japan, 282-286
[42] In which the Tokugawa government, which had reigned for over two centuries, was toppled and the emperor was reinstalled ostensibly as the premier political agent in Japan.
[43] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 22
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Hellyer, Defining, 71
[47] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 24
[48] Lu, Japan, 282-286
[49] Ibid.
[50] Indeed, there were many merchants and intellectuals who desired a more “open” Japan.
[51] Kyushu is the western-most main island of the Japanese archipelago
[52] Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 201. Oda Nobunaga was one of the men responsible for unifying Japan during its “Warring States” period in the late 16th century, just a few decades before the “sakoku” edicts ordered the “closing” of Japan.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Hellyer, Defining, 146.
[55] Lu, Japan, 282-286
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ramsay Muir, The Character of the British Empire (Classic Reprint) (Forgotten Books, 2015). 9. Quotes in both cases because I use these terms as names, not as truths.
[58] The first Sino-Japanese War, lasting from 1894-1895, saw some Japanese expansion that many European powers deemed overly aggressive. Russia, France, and Germany all intervened to try and stop Japan from making excessive demands, since all three countries had economic stakes in China.
[59] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 42
[60] Ibid.
[61]John Charmley, Splendid Isolation?: Britain, the Balance of Power and the Origins of the First World War (London: Faber & Faber, 2013).
[62] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 5. Not to be confused with the Triple Entente between Russia, Britain, and France during the first World War.
[63] S E, 91
[64] Author’s note: This paper does not aim to analyze the Japanese side of the alliance. The period of Japanese history subject to analysis will entirely lie within the first half of the nineteenth century.
[65] Charmley, Splendid Isolation?
[66] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 96
[67] 1. “HANSARD 1803–2005,” http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1898/apr/05/far-east#S4V0056P0_18980405_HOC_224.
[68] Under the “Closed-Country” Edicts that governed Tokugawa foreign policy, Russia was one of the many countries that could not enter diplomatic or commercial relations with Japan.
[69] Hellyer, Defining, 112.
[70] Ibid., 113
[71] This is one of the arguments of Ronald Toby in State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan.
[72] Bakufu is the name for the governing council, including the shogun, of Japan during the Tokugawa period.
[73] Goodman, Japan, 217.
[74] This is not to imply by juxtaposition that Shiba was “progressive” and the rest of Japan barbaric. It is more to say that, given the unelected nature of the government, officials did not have to take counsel from dissenting commoners. Continual and open disagreement with the government, moreover, was often dangerous, so those who did disagreed were often not as vocal as those who agreed. One’s own Eurocentric morality can make talking about pre-Westernized Japan more difficult.
[75] Lu, Japan, 282-286.
[76] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 36.
[77] Ibid., 19.
[78] Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 300.
[79] Lu, Japan, 282-286.
[80] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 34.
[81] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 34.
[82] Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 705.
[83] This is not to say that continental countries were immune to isolationism themselves; these countries simply would have had a disadvantage compared to island nations.
[84] Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), 163.
[85] Howe, Origins, 32.
[86] Francis L. Hawks, Matthew C. Perry, and Lambert Lilly, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1852-1854), 1856, (Lexington: Reprint, ULAN, 2016), 451. Matthew Perry himself lamented the immutable “prejudice” the Japanese had toward foreigners
[87] Relative, at least, to the Japanese in sources translated to English. As I cannot read Japanese, many of one-off or spontaneous comments like Salisbury’s and Chamberlain’s are rendered unavailable to me for the Japanese side.
[88] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 36.
[89] Howard, Splendid Isolation, 24.
[90] Ibid., 9. “Our isolation is dangerous,” she wrote in a letter to Salisbury in 1894.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Chicago, April 7, 2017
Haus Lilienfeld 