Dr Chris Harding

It's this remarkable period, two and a half centuries, so 1600 to middle of the 19th century, of more or less complete peace in Japan, under the control, as you say, of a Tokugawa shogunate based in Edo, now Tokyo.

And I think people in Japan remember it as a real flourishing of the arts, of culture, all sorts of things that a country can do when it's not at war with itself or its neighbours.

I think Japan is quite lucky, actually, in retrospect.

If you think about countries that start to be of interest to Europe, like India and then later China, Japan is known about, but it's not thought to have very much that you might want as a European, as a trader or a potential coloniser.

So it kind of gets left alone.

It's got its own policy of seclusion that you mentioned, but also the Europeans aren't yet coming knocking.

So Japan has a fairly relaxed time of it.

I think that's it.

Yeah, the only Europeans in Japan in this whole period, so the whole of the 17th century, whole of the 18th and the first half of the 19th, are the Dutch.

So their pitch to the Japanese basically is we are businessmen, we're not going to get involved in your politics, we're not going to try to convert you to Christianity.

And they basically live on a tiny island called Dejima, an artificial island, one street or two streets, that's it, plus their little warehouses just off the coast of Nagasaki.

joined by a tiny bridge, guarded all the time by samurai so they can't cause any trouble.

And it's funny, there are these lovely drawings actually of the Dutch on Dejima that seem to show how incurious they were about Japan.

They're there on the verge of being able to know this extraordinary culture and they're playing tennis with each other and they're playing billiards.

You know, they're just not interested.

And it kind of goes both ways if you have a sense of the Japanese also being maybe a little bit incurious.

I don't want to generalise, but...

The Dutch were asked now and again to produce these volumes, kind of like a report on international affairs, that they would put together, take to Edo, present to the Shogun.

These were found by historians a while back and they were in mint condition.

And at first historians were saying, wow, they must have been treated with such reverence.