Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/43

 There is in all history no such singular dénouement to the double policy Hideyoshi had inaugurated. A complete consolidation of the forces of feudalism now followed the failure of foreign conquest; and it is very important to realize how much all this has affected the character of the Japanese, and how during the last three decades they have attempted to do what they failed to accomplish three centuries ago.

Thrown back on themselves, their innate characteristics became intensified—they became more and more like themselves. With minute and voluminous regulations governing every activity; with the guards of the feudal lords on every highway, making travel from one fief to another impossible save under special license; entirely cut off from the outer world, and having no connection even with Korea save what the Daimyo of Tsushima might do by almost stealth at the tiny Fusan settlement, Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was further from China than she was from Europe and America, since the Dutch traders at Deshima were at least a connecting link with the West. There was indeed no single exchange of documents or any species of intercourse