ciety calling forth opposite forces in the other . . . It is by transforming the impulses received from China into means of discovering herself that Japan has vindicated her claim as a culture able to live according to its own law (1973, p. 105.)
During the approximately 265 years that it was ruled under the feudal dictatorship of the Tokugawa clan, Japan enjoyed a long period of internal peace and relative political stability. Tokugawa rule came to an end in 1868. Some date its beginnings from the time when the Policy of Exclusion was adopted (1639) or when the shogunate moved to Edo (Tokyo) and the reduced role of the Emperor was formalized (1640). Actually, Japan was ruled by the Tokugawas under shogun Ieyasu and his immediate successors after 1602. The Tokugawa era followed a period of deep civil unrest in the 16th century during which Western influences in the form of traders, primarily Portuguese and Dutch but also Spanish and British, and in the case of Portugal and Spain, the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries, posed a new and more menacing challenge for Japan. Tokugawa rule ended not long after the American naval ships under Commodore Perry anchored in Tokyo Bay in 1853-54. Thus, Tokugawa rule was punctuated at either end of its tenure by what anthropologist Ruth Benedict called "violent swings of behavior" in Japan (1946, p. 19) with regard to Western influences.
After initially welcoming the Western traders and permitting the Catholic missionaries to practice their religion, which resulted by 1615 in the conversion to Christianity of about 500,000 Japanese, Japan's rulers expelled all Westerners except for the Dutch traders who were confined after 1640 to the tiny man-made island of Deshima inside the port of Nagasaki.
In spite of the rigorous enforcement of the Policy of Exclusion, some foreign influences, primarily Dutch scientific learning and Chinese-based philosophy, survived the early period of To...