Journey Into Japan: The End Of Japan's Isolation - ABC Education

PRESENTER

By order of the Shoguns, Japan was deliberately isolated from the outside world. And this helped preserve within the country until the mid-19th century a tradition of arts and crafts that Europe had already partly forgotten since the Industrial Revolution.

Visuals of craftsmen at work

PRESENTER

In Japan, everything was still made by hand, just as it has been in medieval Europe, with long periods of apprenticeship before the craftsman became qualified. Artisans were formed into guilds and lived together in the same quarter of the town.

PRESENTER

The craft tradition still exists in Japan even today. 200 years ago it catered for a large warrior class of patrons who demanded products of great elegance and taste. Even simple everyday objects were required to be made with a sense of design and a feeling for the material. The increasing affluence of the merchants gave the artisans another and different kind of market.

PRESENTER

One of the great craft products of the 18th and 19th centuries was the woodblock print, in which Japanese artisans and craftsmen excelled. This was perhaps the first mass art, the predecessor of the picture postcard, produced by some of the world's finest draughtsmen. They recorded the life and manners of their time in the most vivid way.

A colourful print

PRESENTER

This print's the work of a modern artist. The people of Edo saw pictures like this.

PRESENTER

Out in the countryside, the peasants laboured long hours to pay the crippling taxes imposed on them. But the system was slowly failing. The Japanese people had fallen behind in technology and defence. Europeans - British, American, Russian - wanted trading concessions and ports of refreshment.

PRESENTER

Eventually, in 1853, an American flotilla under its commander, Commodore Perry, forced an entry into Tokyo Bay. The samurai were both furious and helpless under the superior American guns. The Americans won their treaty and the floodgates to European trade were open where for centuries only the port of Nagasaki had been open, and then only to Dutchmen.

The presenter walks around a model of Dejima Island

PRESENTER

The Dutch had come to Japan at the very beginning of the 17th century, and they soon displaced their main rivals, the Portuguese. And for well over two centuries, they were the only Europeans with trading rights. But it was trading within very narrow limits. They weren't allowed to go around the country. In fact, the Shogun built for them an artificial island in Nagasaki Harbour, and it was here that he put the Dutch trading post.

PRESENTER

Now, harbour works have long since changed the shape of Dejima Island and they've surrounded it with all kinds of reclaimed land, but we know exactly what the trading post looked like. There were houses and offices for the Dutch officials, there were rooms for the officers of the Shogun and the Japanese interpreters, there were storehouses for sugar and copper and cloth.

PRESENTER

The Japanese made sure that there was everything that the Dutch needed on this small island. They even provided this commodious building here as a brothel to make sure that the men didn't stray onto Japan, and the only way onto the mainland was across this small, narrow bridge.

PRESENTER

And during this time the only real source of European knowledge, European inventions, European goods came through this trading post. And the Shoguns made very mild efforts to find out what was going on in the world outside. And almost no efforts at all to keep up with modern inventions.

PRESENTER

So when the Americans forcibly entered Japan, it was seen by many people, especially the clans in the south-west of the country, that this policy of isolation had been a dangerous failure, and that Japan was in no position to defend itself against invaders at this time.