2' External and Internal Challenges

1
2. External and Internal Challenges

• Seclusion Policy
• Unequal Treaties
• Terrorism

2
Seclusion Policy (1620s -1854)

• Control purposes fear of alliance with
  foreigners and corruption by Christianity
• Measures trade in one port, ban to go abroad.
• Loosened in 18th and tightened in early 19th C.
  (British and Russians)
• Dutch learning art and medicine to military
  skills
• Samurais debate Confucian reformism, Shinto
  nationalism, Sakuma Shozan learn from Peter the
  Great, Nobuhiro mercantilist plan.

3
Unequal Treaties

• U.S. interests in the Pacific
• Perry (1853) and Harris treaty negotiation
  (1858), unequal treaties (1859)
• Bakufus plight reaching out but receiving
  critique by daimyo and emperor
• Political realignment alliance of daimyo,
  samurai, emperor, court officials v.s. Bakufu.

4
Commodore Perry and the Black ship
5
Terrorism

• Purge by Regent (Naosuke) and his assassination
  by radical samurai
• shishi,who gathered at Kyoto and used violence as
  means of politics
• Honor the emperor and expel the barbarian
  directed against Bakufu
• Yoshida Shoin (1830-60)as their spiritual leader

6
Yoshida Shoin
7
Study Questions

• What was the internal crisis and what was the
  external crisis that beset Japan in the mid-19th
  Century? How did the Japanese respond to these
  crises?
• Why did the Tokugawa rulers adopt closed
  country policy? How did they maintain contact
  and obtain knowledge of the outside?
• When and why did the U.S. open Japan? Why did the
  bakufu accept the unequal treaties? What were the
  consequences?