Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- Conventions
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Geographical regions of Japan (the shaded Kinai is a subregion of Kinki)
- 1 Introduction: Japan's internal and external worlds, 1582–1941
- 2 Japan and its Chinese and European worlds, 1582–1689
- 3 The Japanese economy, 1688–1789
- 4 An age of stability: Japan's internal world, 1709–1783, in perspective
- 5 Prosperity amid crises, 1789–1853
- 6 Sakoku under pressure: the gaiatsu of the 1850s and 1860s
- 7 Fashioning a state and a foreign policy: Japan 1868–1919
- 8 From peace (Versailles 1919) to war (Pearl Harbor 1941)
- Tokugawa shoguns
- Main regnal periods
- Glossary
- Introduction to bibliography
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - An age of stability: Japan's internal world, 1709–1783, in perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- Conventions
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Geographical regions of Japan (the shaded Kinai is a subregion of Kinki)
- 1 Introduction: Japan's internal and external worlds, 1582–1941
- 2 Japan and its Chinese and European worlds, 1582–1689
- 3 The Japanese economy, 1688–1789
- 4 An age of stability: Japan's internal world, 1709–1783, in perspective
- 5 Prosperity amid crises, 1789–1853
- 6 Sakoku under pressure: the gaiatsu of the 1850s and 1860s
- 7 Fashioning a state and a foreign policy: Japan 1868–1919
- 8 From peace (Versailles 1919) to war (Pearl Harbor 1941)
- Tokugawa shoguns
- Main regnal periods
- Glossary
- Introduction to bibliography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The interrogation in Edo in 1709 (with the aid of a Nagasaki interpreter) of Sidotti, an Italian Jesuit who had entered the country as a missionary, and the calm analysis by Arai Hakuseki of its implications, pointed to a dramatically more relaxed view of external challenge than in the early 1690s. Japan was about to enter on almost a century of remarkable freedom from anxiety on the external front. Only the apparition on its coasts in 1771 from Kamchatka of the Hungarian adventurer Moric Alasdar Benyowsky (1746–86) escaping from detention in Siberia seemed to call this security into question. He addressed two letters to the Dutch which announced the imminence of attack from the north. Many modern writers have argued that the Benyowsky (rendered later in Japanese as Bengoro or, in modern Japanese, Benyofusuki) affair reinforced an existing state of paranoia. There is no evidence of an immediate reaction to Benyowsky. The text of his letters is known only in the reporting of the Dutch to Batavia which contained translations from German into Dutch, which in turn were translated by the Japanese interpreters in Nagasaki. There are only two – fleeting – mentions of the event in the Tsūkō ichiran, the huge compendium of official documents in the 1850s. Only from 1785 when Edo missions of enquiry were sent to Ezo, did the northern frontier acquire a political significance.
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- Information
- A History of Japan, 1582–1941Internal and External Worlds, pp. 95 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003