The Dutchmen at Deshima.

The Dutchmen who lived at Deshima for two centuries and a half, and the foreigners who first landed at the treaty ports in 1859, on inquiring about the methods of the Japanese Government, the laws and their administration, found that everything was veiled behind a vague embodiment of something which was called “the Law.”  What that law was, by whom enacted, and under what sanctions enforced, no one could tell; though all seemed to stand in awe of it as something of superhuman efficiency.  Its mysteriousness was only equalled by the abject submission which it received.

Foreign diplomatists, on trying to deal with the seat and source of authority, instead of seeing the real head of power, played, as it were, a game of chess against a mysterious hand stretched out from behind a curtain.  Morally, the whole tendency of such a dual system of exclusion and of inclusion was to make a nation of liars, foster confirmed habits of deceit, and create a code of politeness vitiated by insincerity.

With such repression of the natural powers of humanity, it was but in accordance with the nature of things that licentiousness should run riot, that on the fringes of society there should be the outcast and the pariah, and that the social waste of humanity by prostitution, by murder, by criminal execution under a code that prescribed the death penalty for hundreds of offences, should be enormous.  It is natural also that in such a state of society population[7] should be kept down within necessary limits, not only by famine, by the restraints of feudalism, by legalized murder in the form of vendetta, by a system of prostitution that made and still makes Japan infamous, by child murder, by lack of encouragement given to feeble or malformed children to live, and by various devices known to those who were ingenious in keeping up so artificial a state of society.

That there were many who tried to break through this wall, from both the inside and the outside, and to force the frontiers of exclusion and inclusion, is not to be wondered at.  Externally, there were bold spirits from Christendom who burned to know the secrets of the mysterious land.  Some even yearned to wear the ruby crown.  The wonderful story of past Christian triumphs deeply stirred the heart of more than one fiery spirit, and so we find various attempts made by the clerical brethren of southern Europe to enter the country.  Bound by their promises, the Dutch captains could not introduce these emissaries of a banned religion within the borders; yet there are several notable instances of Roman Catholic “religious"[8] getting themselves left by shipmasters on the shores of Japan.  The lion’s den of reality was Yedo.  Like the lion’s den of fable, the footprints all led one way, and where these led the bones of the victims soon lay.