Isolationism is a situation where a country segregates itself from other countries. This could be in relation to trade, making alliances or any interactive activities. The country deliberately absents itself from military, political and economic agreements. It ensures that it enjoys peace as there are the least possible interactions with other countries.
China and Japan’s geographical position was one of the key contributing factors to their isolation from contact with West and the world economy in the early modernization period. In other ways, however, they embarked on radically different paths: China bestows a greater emphasis on stability and tradition while Japan redefines some of its institutions and culture (Bell 48).
On issues of trade, Ming emperors of China undervalued commerce such that they opted for isolation to trading in a period when trade enjoyed immense success. Their assumption was that china received minimal benefits from the voyages. The Japanese believed that the European merchants were degrading national cohesion, for example, the sale of firearms by the merchants could be the source of warfare. The only legal foreign trade was a small trading post that belonged to the Dutch and the occasional Chinese Junks in Nagasaki, Japan’s south-west.
Movement into and out of the two countries was under restriction in one way or the other. China built the “Great Wall” which was a fortified wall built along an east-to-west line along its northern border. This was further enhanced by the physical barriers that separated China from Egypt, the Middle East, and India (Ikeda 122). There were the brutal deserts and high mountain ranges, The Tian Shan and the Himalayas, thick rainforests that divided China from Southeast Asia, a forbidding dessert, the Gobi and the vast Pacific Ocean to the east. Japan, on the other hand, adopted a policy known as the Sakoku ("locked country"). It was a foreign relations procedure under which no foreigner could get in to Japan. The citizens could not leave the country either as they would face a death penalty. In 1633-39, the policy went through a number of policies and edicts before implementation by the Tokugawa shogunate, and became effective until 1853.There are virtually no non-Japanese in Japan, 116 million residents of the country are Japanese with only some thousand aliens in temporary habitation and some permanent, but unassimilated Koreans.
Culture was another contributing factor to the isolation of the two countries. China has a unique history and culture such that it bases its judgment on its own standards. Unfortunately, part of it is marred by shameful social bankruptcy, such as tolerating leaders who massacre innocent citizens, as was the blood and fire case at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Such violations by rulers are frequently tolerated, ignored and even covertly encouraged (Yahuda 76). On the positive side, the highly upheld Chinese culture and traditional values China have remained dominant making it unique. The Japanese have an intrinsic linguistic, ethnical and regular system of education that defines them to such an extent that those who go abroad find it hard to get successfully incorporated into their new society (Itoh 32).
Unlike the Anglo-European philosophic traditions, Chinese thinking is concrete and practical. This makes is quite hard for external influence. Japan, on the other hand, has a complicated language that they are hardly capable of speaking themselves. This coupled with the other factors have barred other countries from interfering or influencing these two countries.
Works cited
Bell, Oliver. The two Chinas; an introduction to the history, geography, culture, and economic
and political problems of Communist China and Nationalist China.. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1962. Print.
Ikeda, Michiko. Japan in trade isolation, 1926-37 & 1948-85. Tokyo: I-House Press, 2008.
Print.
Itoh, Mayumi. Globalization of Japan: Japanese sakoku mentality and U.S. efforts to open
Japan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Print.
Streissguth, Thomas, Lora Friedenthal, and Jennifer L. Weber. Isolationism. New York: Chelsea
House, 2010. Print.
Yahuda, Michael B.. Towards the end of isolationism: China's foreign policy after Mao. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Print.
