Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/127

 blunted by repeated evidences of the Government's financial unscrupulousness; tradition and the inflexible rules of caste taught him to place trade at the lowest point in the scale of human occupations, and he lived in an essentially military age when the business type was out of touch with its surroundings and had not yet attained any appreciable development. Observing these antecedents, the historian is confronted by an unexpected consequence. He finds that, from the very outset, Japanese national enterprise turned quickly into the paths of foreign commerce, and that the people exhibited a marked faculty for engaging with vigour and success in routes of peaceful trade where countries like Portugal, Spain, Holland, and England were then supposed to enjoy a monopoly. Between the coming of the Portuguese in 1542, and the closing of Japan to the outer world in 1636, the Japanese established commercial relations, and inaugurated a trade of more or less volume, with no less than twenty foreign markets. The reputation that the island empire subsequently acquired owing to more than two centuries of semi-seclusion has hidden these facts from general observation, but they are none the less historical. Two things present themselves clearly to view: first, that there was originally no evidence whatever of a disposition to impose restrictions on the comings and goings of Western traders; secondly, that the benefits of commerce,