Wake Up With A Did You Know: How Japan Was Never Colonized By The West

I was listening to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast the other day. The latest episodes are called "Supernova In the East" and it's all about the history of the Far East. Which is great because going to public school in the United States means that you learn that Japan basically didn't exist until they decided to bomb Pearl Harbor with the exception of that one time Tom Cruise was learning the ways of the Samurai.

Now I am going to paraphrase and shorten some stuff that was in the podcast because well…it's Dan Carlin and his podcast episodes are a minimum four hours long and who has time for that unless you're still trying to train your puppy to pee outside. One thing Carlin pointed out was that Japan was never colonized by the West. That stuck out to me because it's like hey…the West colonizes everything. How'd they do that?

Western powers always had a game plan for colonization of new territories. They didn't really go in guns blazing. They'd say "Hey natives of (anywhere) you guys have some pretty cool shit. We have some pretty cool shit and money. Would you like to trade?" and the native population would say yes. Then some time would go by and the Western powers would say "hey this is working out so great. So great in fact that we really want to set up a permanent trading post in your great country. Cool?" and the native population would hesitate, but eventually say okay. Then the Western powers would encroach and encroach and piss everyone off until sometimes the population would attack the Westeners living there and if that didn't happen then the Westerners would fake the attack to make it look like they were attacked. So then the Western Powers would be like "hey whoa whoa whoa, we can't have this. We can't trust you to protect our people and assets so we are going to bring in our military. Just a small force to protect our own people. Nothing to worry about" and the native population would be like "hey we don't like that" but the West would just do it anyways. Then the military would set up bases and come in larger and larger numbers until the Western powers were just like "yeah, all this shit is ours now". The end.

Japan saw all this happening and were like "we are on to you sneaky fucks. Take your gold, and your boats, and your Jesus and get the FUCK out fo here or our samurai's will chop your heads off" and it worked. By 1639 Japan was completely closed off from Western influence. From everyone except for those non-threatening Dutch guys. Japan let Dutch bring in some books and other goods through one port in Southern Japan so Japan could kinda keep tabs on what was going down in the rest of the world.

The great thing about Barstool is that we can pretty much write about whatever we want. So it's things that interest me.  I thought this was interesting. Decent way to start the day. Have a good Wednesday everyone.