Sakoku

The Tokugawa shogunate issues its first 1630s maritime-restriction order

The first so-called closed-country order did not close the country: officially authorized Japanese ships could still sail.

1633: the first of five

In 1633 the Tokugawa shogunate, under Tokugawa Iemitsu, issued the first of five orders later grouped together as the Kan'ei 'sakoku edicts.'

That grouping is retrospective. The contemporary machinery was kaikin — maritime restriction — and no contemporary policy used sakoku to name a single national-isolation law. The order ran to seventeen articles and is dated Kan'ei 10, second month, twenty-eighth day.

What it actually prohibited

It prohibited Japanese ships from sailing abroad unless they carried the required shogunal authorization. It did not yet ban every Japanese overseas voyage, and the red-seal licensed-voyage system continued in a narrowed form.

It also drew a human line at five years: Japanese who had resided overseas longer than that faced restrictions on returning.

One step, not a wall

The order was one stage in a tightening system of control over seafaring, foreign commerce, Christianity, and the Nagasaki administration. Four more followed, in 1634, 1635, 1636, and 1639.

No single incident is securely established as its trigger — and the Shimabara-Amakusa uprising often named as the cause of the policy did not begin until 1637, four years later.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The listed event conflates two different years: 1633 saw the first order in the series, while the better-known, more comprehensive third order was issued in 1635.
The first order is dated Kan'ei 10, second month, twenty-eighth day in the Japanese calendar. The sheet retains year-only precision rather than supplying an unverified Gregorian conversion.
'Sakoku edict' is a retrospective label. Contemporary policy did not use sakoku to describe a single national-isolation law.