With the 400th anniversary of Japanese-Dutch relations upon us, interest has been rekindled in Japan's foreign relations during the Tokugawa period, and the part played by Nagasaki as Japan's sole international portal. Often overlooked, however, is China's role as a window on the world in Nagasaki at that time. Thus the re-release in paperback of Princeton Professor Marius Jansen's concise and readable 1992 study is timely.
Jansen's intentions in writing this book were twofold: to focus on Japan's extensive contacts with China from the late 16th to the late 19th centuries, a subject largely ignored by historians writing in English, and to challenge the dominant notion in Western scholarship of Japan as an isolated nation cut off from the outside world for most of the Tokugawa period.
This latter perspective, argues Jansen, is largely a result of the habit of Western historians "viewing the period solely in terms of Japan's ties with the West, at the expense of its relationship with closer Asian neighbors."