buhiro, favored applying Western science to Japan's growing imperialist enterprise in Pacific Asia (Tsunoda, et al. 558-63).
However, in 1790, the Tokugawa shogunate formally suppressed all heterodoxy, a situation that was to last for some 60 years and that specifically included "restrictions on intellectual contact with the West" (Tsunoda, et al. 552). That appears to have been a response to the many attempts, chiefly by Russian and American shippers, to open Japan to Western trade by occupying selected Japanese ports. By 1850, there was factionalism within shogunate politics, one faction advocating restoration of an emperor with real powers, another the strengthening of military and civil authority inside Japan, and another the "adoption of Western science and art while preserving Oriental ethics." Further, the shogunate's import-substitution philosophy of political economy had run its course, and Japan's agrarian interests were at great risk. Contact with the West was inevitable, and in 1860 the US and Japan concluded a trade treaty.
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