the early seventeenth century, the country was re united under the Tokugawa Shogunate, a military government which ruled in the name of a figurehead Emperor. Under the Shogunate, Japan, which had had extensive contacts with the West in the sixteenth century, was virtually cut off from the world until the "opening of Japan" by the American Commodore Perry in the 1840s.
At this point, the Japanese might have been expected to face the same fate as other non western peoples: they would be reduced to col
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