This book seeks to describe how Japan manipulated existing diplomatic channels to ensure national security. Rather, far from aiming at seclusion, Japan's diplomacy in the seventeenth century was orchestrated to achieve certain objectives, both outside the country and inside it. The aim was to build Japan into an autonomous center of its own. Since the country was "closed," elaborate and expensive foreign embassies were obliged to make the journey to Edo. Countries which were perceived as potential threats, such as Portugal and Spain, were excluded from this process. Only those such as the Chinese and the Dutch, with whom trade was recognized as desirable, were allowed a supervised presence in Japan itself. Closing the gates to Japan was not the object. Rather, carefully judging just when they should be open and shut was the aim.

Japanese cultural life had reached a low ebb at the beginning of the Tokugawa period. The Japanese society which emerged when Tokugawa Ieyasu had completed the process of pacifying warring baronies was neither literary, nor hardly literate. The rulers were warriors and the people they ruled were largely illiterate. The Japan of 1868 was a very different society: practically every samurai was literate and it was a world in which books abounded. The transformation which had occurred in these two and a half centuries was an essential precondition for the success of the policy which the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were to adopt. An in-depth survey of the development and education during the period, this book remains one of the key analyses of the effects of Tokugawa educators and education on modern day Japan.

Variable hours in a changing society -- Towers, pillows, and graphs: variation in clock design -- Astronomical time measurement and changing conceptions of time -- Geodesy, cartography, and time measurement -- Navigation and global time -- Time measurement on the ground in Kaga domain -- Clock-makers at the crossroads -- Western time and the rhetoric of enlightenment