Why was Japan closed to world trade?
Actually, Japan was never closed to foreign trade. During the Edo period when Japan had closed borders, trade with the Netherlands, China, and Korea continued. The Shogunate did not like how Catholicism was spreading in Japan, and with the encouragement from the Protestant Dutch, the Portuguese and Spanish were banished from Japan. It didn’t help that there was a large Catholic rebellion called the Shimabara Rebellion in the early 17th century. Dutch was studied in Japan to the extent that when Matthew Perry came to Japan in the 19th century, the language initially used for communication was Dutch. Since the Protestants didn’t have a counterpart to the Jesuits, they weren’t considered a threat, so trade with the Dutch continued. The English were in Japan for a while too, but they lost out to Dutch competition and withdrew.
