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 of 1638. Shortly before its outbreak an edict of the most drastic nature was promulgated. It declared that any Japanese subject attempting to go abroad, or any Japanese subject already abroad who attempted to return home, should be executed; it directed that all foreigners professing Christianity should be imprisoned at Omura; it forbade Eurasian children to reside in Japan, and it decreed banishment for any persons adopting an Eurasian child and severe punishment for their relatives. Four years later, the Dutch were required to confine themselves to Deshima. They had succeeded in effectually prejudicing the Japanese against the Portuguese and the Spaniards, but they had not succeeded in preserving any large measure of respect for themselves.

These cruel and illiberal measures crowned Japan's policy of restriction and isolation,—a policy which may be said to have commenced on a radical scale with the proclamation of Iyeyasu in 1614, and to have culminated in the imprisonment of the Dutch at Deshima in 1641 by his grandson, Iyeyasu, the third Tokugawa Shōgun. In that interval another step, wholly destructive of maritime enterprise, was taken by the same Iyeyasu. It has already been alluded to. He ordered that all vessels of sea-going capacity should be destroyed, and that no craft should thenceforth be built of sufficient size to venture beyond home waters.

A more complete metamorphosis of a nation's