In the major literature on early modern Japan, the sakoku (closed country) edicts lurk in the background, and while scholars are generally aware of the major tenets of the policy, for example, the inability of Japanese to travel abroad or the clampdown on Christianity, the specifics of the edicts have yet to be studied in detail despite its potential to reveal much about this era of Japan's history. This work seeks to clarify the seventeen-article sakoku edicts of 1635 as well as to situate the edicts in the general foreign policy of seventeenth-century Edo Japan. This book will also examine...