The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720 - 1830

The Plasticity of Identity under Anarchy

“…The alternative option of 'open-country' had virtually no social support when Perry arrived, in part due to the depth and hegemony of seclusion thinking. Those who studied the West were few and isolated both from the outside and other Japanese (Keene, 1969;Wakabayashi, 1986;Wilson, 1992: 40-1). As one scholar has noted, Japan was 'wrapped … in an ideological orthodoxy so powerful that it prevented individuals and groups from acting with true creativity or independence, and for all but a small number of eccentrics on the margins of normal life, they made alternative ways of thinking unimaginable' (Howe, 1996: 70-1).…”

7. In the Footprints of the Buddha: Ceylon and the Quest for the Origin of Buddhism in Early Modern Japan – A Minor Episode in the History of the Japanese Imagination of India

“…On Shiba Kōkan, seeKeene (1969). 13 Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉, Sekai kunizukushi 世界国尽 (Compendium of All Countries of the World), p. 596a.…”

Asia and the world economy in historical perspective

“…While most contact with Europeans was cut off, relations with China through Nagasaki and with Korea through the island of Tsushima and with Southeast Asia through the Ryukyu Islands continued uninterrupted. The tiny Dutch trading post at Deshima was a very narrow 'window to the West' but one through which Japan achieved much greater knowledge of modern science and technology than India or China despite those countries not having anything resembling the sakoku policy (see Keene (1969)).…”