Why did Japan ban everyone except for the Dutch? (Short Animated Documentary)



Japan was an infamously closed off country for over two centuries until the Commodore Matthew Perry turned up and forced it to …

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43 thoughts on “Why did Japan ban everyone except for the Dutch? (Short Animated Documentary)”

  1. A 1600s engraving prompted my application (aged 11) to join the Franciscan Order. It showed Japs sawing Catholic missionaries in half, head to toe, using a long saw operated by two men. Not all facts about Japan are 'fun.' See, eg torture camp 731 operated by Japanese in 1930s Manchuria. PS when the joining papers came, my mother refused to let me become a Franciscan.

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  2. 0:52 The video creator is not telling the truth. The facts of the matter are that many Japanese (over 300,000) had become Christian, and the shoguns were afraid that the people would call for freedom, so they crushed Christianity in Japan.

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  3. Nerd comment: The blue stripe on the bottom of the flags you show is a sky blue of the flag of Luxembourg and not the royal blue of the Netherlands. I really love this series and cannot thank you enough for taking the trouble to create these brilliant videos. But I wanted to point this out. Guess where I'm from.

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  4. When Perry first arrived in Edo harbor, he performed a gun salute, albeit quite aggressively since all the guns were aimed at the city. This led the Japanese to believe that they were being bombarded and so they built a number of artificial islands in the harbor to prevent warships from getting close enough to bombard the city, the largest of which survives today as the shopping district of Odaiba.

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