n traders allowed to come to Japan, but Japanese
were allowed to go abroad. And all this was in the line of a
long-continued Japanese policy--the policy thanks to which Chinese
influence had made itself so strongly felt in Japan, and which had
brought in Buddhism and Confucianism, not to speak of arts and
letters of foreign provenance.

At the close of the hundred years, in 1641, all was changed. Japan
was absolutely isolated. Foreigners were forbidden to enter, except
the Dutch traders who were confined to the little island of Deshima.
And natives were forbidden to go out, or to accept at home the
religious teachings of foreigners. Only ships suited for the
coastwise trade might be built. The nation's intercourse with
Occidental civilization was shut off, and its natural power of change
and growth through foreign influences was thus held in check. The
wonder is that it was not destroyed by this inhibition. The whole
story of foreign intercourse as it has so far been told makes it
plain that the reason why it was prohibited was in the nature of
foreign propaganda and not in any unreadiness of the Japanese for
western civilization.

SECOND ERA OF FOREIGN TRADE

Japan's seclusion was maintained unflinchingly. But, though her goods
found a market in China, only during her period of self-effacement,
the reputation of her people for military prowess was such that no
outside nation thought of forcing her to open her ports. A British
seaman, Sir Edward Michelborne, in the sequel of a fight between his
two ships and a Japanese junk near Singapore, left a record that "The
Japanese are not allowed to land in any part of India with weapons,
being a people so desperate and daring that they are feared in all
places where they come." Nevertheless, Russian subjects, their shores
being contiguous with those of Japan, occasionally found their way as
sailors or colonists into the waters of Saghalien, the Kuriles, and
Yezo. The Japanese did not then exercise effective control over Yezo,
although the island was nominally under their jurisdiction. Its
government changed from one hand to another in the centuries that
separated the Kamakura epoch from the Tokugawa, and in the latter
epoch we find the Matsumae daimyo ruling all the islands northward of
the Tsugaru Straits. But the Matsumae administration contented itself
with imposing taxes and left the people severely alone. Thus, when in
1778, a small party of Russians appeared at Nemuro