First Kurofune Ships: Nau Do Trato
In 1543 Portuguese traders arrived in Japan initiating the first contacts with the West. Soon they established a trade route linking their headquarters in Goa, via Malacca to Nagasaki. Large carracks engaged in the flourishing "Nanban trade", introducing modern firearms to Japan, arquebuses, a major innovation of the Sengoku period a time of intense internal warfare, and also refined sugar, optics and other inventions. Later, they engaged in triangular trade, exchanging silver from Japan with silk from China via Macau.
Large carracks of 1200 to 1600 tons - named nau do trato, silver naus, and China's naus by the Portuguese - engaged in this trade had the hull painted black with pitch, and the term came to name all western vessels. The name was inscribed in the Nippo Jisho, the first western Japanese dictionary compiled in 1603.
In 1549 missionary Francis Xavier started a Jesuit mission in Japan. Christianity spread, mingled with the new trade, making some 300,000 converts among peasants and some daimyō (warlords). In 1637 the Shimabara Rebellion blamed on the Christian influence was suppressed. Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries faced progressively tighter restrictions, and were confined to the island of Dejima before being expelled in 1639.
The Tokugawa shogunate retreated back into a policy of isolationism, the Sakoku (鎖国?, "locked country") forbidding contact with most outside countries. Only a limited-scale trade and diplomatic relations with China, Korea, the Ryukyu Islands and the Netherlands was maintained. The Sakoku policy remained in effect until 1853 with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and the opening of Japan.
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