What Happens When the Dutch Show Up: Finding and Addressing a Historical Empathy Gap in Teaching Tokugawa Foreign Relations

Popular media discourse today offers plenty of evidence that empathy is in short supply. As a discipline, history has responded to the present moment by emphasizing the importance of practicing, modeling, and teaching historical empathy as both scholars and educators. In order to successfully push students to recognize their modern judgments and appreciate a given historical context in all its complexity requires that we contend with the myths and assumptions they bring into the classroom. In teaching Tokugawa Japan (1615-1868), few myths are as persistent or as pernicious as that of the “closed country,” or the idea that early modern Japan was isolated from the outside world.

This talk focuses on the challenges of teaching Tokugawa foreign relations in two very different geographical and demographic contexts – a small liberal arts college in the southeast United States and a large research institution on the west coast. Student responses to assigned primary source readings on Dutch visitors to the archipelago diverged dramatically in these two contexts. Where students in the larger university were able to achieve relatively balanced insight into Tokugawa foreign policy decisions through class discussion, the students at the smaller and more homogenous college consistently struggled to move past their identification with and sympathy for Dutch merchants. They held much deeper assumptions about Japan’s isolation from the outside world (i.e. Europe), and as a result, tended to conclude that Tokugawa Japan was stubborn and self-defeating in its foreign policy. The process of finding the right tools to evaluate and address different responses to this particular classroom dynamic helps to clarify what exactly we mean when we talk about historical empathy and why it matters so much.