ABSTRACT
The term sakoku and its concomitant Eurocentric logic did not win immediate acceptance in Japan after Shizuki Tadao’s translation of Kaempfer’s “Enquiry” under the title Sakokuron at the start of the nineteenth century. A reexamination of the Japanese world order and a review of the attendant historical facts had already been undertaken by members of the Japanese ruling class in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The fact that only China, Korea, Ryukyu and the Red-Hairs come and go is not because of a mutual need for market profits, but because there have been grounds from the outset for their long-continuing comings. Watanabe Kazan was another sponsor of such gatherings or study groups. Hence Perry’s opening of Japanese ports did not mean that the standpoint of those who believed in the legitimacy of the Japanese world order had suddenly crumbled away.
