When, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Japan’s conquering arm reached across the waters, to ravage the coast of China, to extend her influence as far south as Siam, and even to invade Korea with a large army in 1592, it looked as if she were well started on her career as a world-power.  But that was not yet to be.  The hegemony of her clans passed into the powerful and shrewd Tokugawa family, the policy of which was peace and national self-sufficiency.

The representatives of the Occidental nations (chiefly of Spain and Portugal) were banished.  The Christian religion (Roman Catholic), which for over fifty years had enjoyed free access and had made great progress, was forbidden and stamped out, not without much bloodshed.  Foreign travel and commerce were strictly interdicted.  A particular school of Confucian ethics was adopted and taught as the state religion.  Feudalism was systematically established and intentionally developed.  Each and every man had his assigned and recognized place in the social fabric, and change was not easy.  It is doubtful if any European country has ever given feudalism so long and thorough a trial.  Never has feudalism attained so complete a development as it did in Japan under the Tokugawa regime of over 250 years.

During this period no influences came from other lands to disturb the natural development.  With the exception of three ships a year from Holland, an occasional stray ship from other lands, and from fifteen to twenty Dutchmen isolated in a little island in the harbor of Nagasaki, Japan had no communication with foreign lands or alien peoples.

Of this period, extending to the middle of the present century, the ordinary visitor and even the resident have but a superficial knowledge.  All the changes that have taken place in Japan, since the coming of Perry in 1854, are attributed by the easy-going tourist to the external pressure of foreign nations.  But such travelers know nothing of the internal preparations that had been making for generations previous to the arrival of Perry.  The tourist is quite ignorant of the line of Japanese scholars that had been undermining the authority of the military rulers, “the Tokugawa,” in favor of the Imperial line which they had practically supplanted.

The casual student of Japan has been equally ignorant of the real mental and moral caliber of the Japanese.  Dressed in clothing that appeared to us fantastic, and armed with cumbersome armor and old-fashioned guns, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that the people were essentially uncivilized.  We did not know the intellectual discipline demanded of one, whether native or foreign, who would master the native language or the native systems of thought.  We forgot that we appeared as grotesque and as barbarous to them as they to us, and that mental ability and moral worth are qualities that do not show on the surface of a nation’s civilization.  While they thought us to be “unclean,” “dogs,” “red-haired devils,” we perhaps thought them to be clever savages, or at best half-civilized heathen, without moral perceptions or intellectual ability.