Japan was really quite xenophobic.
The Dutch had access for awhile -- long enough to introduce such novelties as pistols, bread, and Christianity. The drawings of the seagoing Dutch by Japanese are amusing from this distance: blue pantaloons, big noses, strange blond hair.
When the government decided that the trade they were allowing was not worth the risk to their culture, they closed the port. They tried to wipe out Japanese Christians as a threat to traditional culture as well.
As an island nation they had always felt their vulnerability to attacks from China and Korea, but had managed to prevail -- at least once by dint of a powerful storm that sank the enemy ships: the divine wind, or kami kaze. That was rather like the time the Spanish Armada sank in a storm off Britain.
A lifetime ago I studied Japanese history, and I ended up pondering the differences between the two island nations of Britain and Japan. Japan, tho powerfully influenced by China far back in history, was very resistant to not just invasion but immigration and settlement. Homogeneity is built into the national psyche of Japan in ways not understandable to Americans or to our parent culture, Britain.
Britain is a culture of invasions and invaders who assimilated: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Norsemen, Normans -- reinforced over centuries by the intermarriage of their royal families. And all of this before Indian, African, and Caribbean people from the now-former Empire started arriving. They have their troubles with race, just as we do, but they work at it, just as we do.
The Japanese reverence for racial and cultural homogeneity has persisted throughout time. Back in the 1970s one of my work colleagues had a side job as a Japanese/English interpreter at the airport. This blue eyed blond was born and raised in Japan, and I asked her why she left. She said that it was because there was no assimilation possible, that she would always be a gaijin (foreigner), so she decided to leave. It's one thing to arrive as a fully formed adult, but it's another to absorb a language and culture from infancy and to be always told it is not your own.
With the aging of Japan's population, foreigners have been invited in to fill vital roles in caring for the aged and so on, and now that it's been going on for some decades, I wonder if the Japanese government has finally managed to grapple with the problem of citizenship for foreigners and the children of foreigners born in Japan.
Admiral Perry broke their isolation, and they embarked on a very successful program of modernization. WW II was a disaster from start to finish, but by the late 1960s one of my professors remarked: They achieved everything they ever wanted by peaceful means that they failed to do by war.
What he didn't remark on was how powerfully they feel that they are Japanese, and that nobody else is.
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