ASIAN 6705

Gateways of Tokugawa Japan: Global Encounters and Reframing the “Closed Country”

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This seminar offers an examination of Japanese foreign relations and engagements during the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868). This period has traditionally been organized through the frame of Japanese isolationism (sakoku, lit. “closed country”). A retroactive application of Englebert Kaempfer’s conception of Japanese foreign politics, the term sakoku remains entrenched in twentieth-century understandings of the period’s transregional and transcultural dynamics. This course guides students through a reconsideration of the isolationist historiography of early modern Japan, known to famed Japanologist Donald Keene as the “world within walls.” Upon further study of the "four gateways," which facilitated trade with the Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Ryukyuans, and Ainu, recent scholarship has moved towards a pluralistic understanding of sakoku, with the corrective terminology “maritime prohibitions” serving to highlight the multifocal, dynamic, and diachronic aspects of the concept. By examining historical documents, world maps, cosmographic writings, and literary evidence, we will explore the various modalities by which Japanese agents imagined, encountered, and ordered the outside world. No knowledge of Japanese required.

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