Click here to go to YouTube video In his masterpiece “Moby-Dick, or The Whale” the 19th-century American author Herman Melville described Japan as a “double-bolted land”. This is because, in the Edo period (1603-1867), Japan was closed to the rest of the world for more than 200 years, keeping American whalers away. In this episode, we will look at how the exclusionism of the Edo shogunate began. At the beginning of the Edo period, Tokugawa Ieyasu was active in foreign trade. Merchant ships with Ieyasu’s permits were actively traveling to and from Thailand, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries, and a number of Japanese towns were established in port cities…