Particularly since the 1960s, historians of Japan have studied in depth foreign relations in the first half of the seventeenth century, a period when the Tokugawa shogunate (bakufu) instituted measures that significantly altered Japan's interactions with the outside world, creating what is often dubbed a “closed country” (sakoku) policy. Michael S. Laver seeks to shed new light on this seminal period through a detailed examination of the “sakoku edicts,” seventeen directives concerning intercourse with the outside world issued by the bakufu in 1635. Laver methodically analyzes each edict, organizing his discussion into chapters on the edicts that restricted travel outside the country, those that prohibited Christianity, and those directed at foreign trade. His other chapters examine related events of the period: the expulsion of the Portuguese following the Shimabara Rebellion, the transfer of Dutch traders to the island of Dejima in Nagasaki, and the expulsion...
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