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The first contact with the West occurred about 1542, when a Portuguese
ship, blown off its course to China, landed in Japan. During the next
century, traders from Portugal, the Netherlands, England, and Spain arrived,
as did Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan missionaries. During the early part
of the 17th century, Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate suspected that the traders
and missionaries were actually forerunners of a military conquest by
European powers. This caused the Shogunate to place foreigners under
progressively tighter restrictions.
Ultimately, Japan forced all
foreigners to leave and barred all relations with the outside world except
for severely restricted commercial contacts with Dutch and Chinese merchants
at Nagasaki.
Russian encroachments from the north led the Shogunate to
extend direct rule to Hokkaido and Sakhalin in 1807 but the policy of
exclusion continued. This isolation lasted for 200 years, until Commodore
Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy forced the opening of Japan to the West with
the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 and the Harris Treaty was signed with the
United States on July 29, 1858.
Within several years, renewed contact with the West profoundly altered
Japanese society. The Shogunate was forced to resign, and the emperor was
restored to power. The "Meiji Restoration" of 1868 initiated many reforms.
The feudal system was abolished, and numerous Western institutions were
adopted, including a Western legal system and constitutional government
along quasiparliamentary lines.
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