Hello, the episode you're about to listen to is part of a multi-part series introducing an overview

of Japanese history.

This is a repeat of one of the original projects the History of Japan podcast was built on,

and is intended to serve as an update and supplement to these original works.

After 10 years, my hope is to return to this approach and to do it a little bit better,

given the skills that I have improved in the intervening years.

If you haven't been doing so already, you should listen to these episodes sequentially,

starting with episode 501.

Without any further ado, enjoy the episode. Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 526, The Outside World, and Tokugawa Japan.

This week, I want to talk a bit about Japan's connection to the rest of the world during the

Edo period, which might seem like an oddly specific topic on its face because don't we know

the answer already?

We talked two weeks ago about the closed borders of the Sakoku policy and the restrictions

on overseas travel and trade.

What more is there to say of the outside world? And that's

commonly the message you get about Tokugawa Japan. It was isolated, cut off from the world at large.

And that's not fundamentally wrong, certainly compared to the 1500s and to post-feudal Japan, certainly.

Edo-era Japan was way more isolated from the rest of the world.

But isolation isn't the full story either. Which is why taking some time to talk about the ways in which a

connection to the outside world was maintained is so important, because in reality, there were still

some lines of communication open,

and particularly as feudalism came to an end, those continued connections would be very important for shaping what came next.

...