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Global Voices
Global Voices
A scale model of the former foreign enclave of Dejima, in Nagasaki. Dejima was a self-contained trading post reserved for Europeans at Nagasaki, Japan, from 1634 to 1854, during Japan’s “period of isolation” (鎖国, sakoku). Original image by Hidetsugu Tonomura has been slightly edited, under terms of image license. Image license: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) Following the identification of a new strain of COVID-19, the Japanese government briefly attempted to completely seal the country’s air and sea borders. The sudden policy prompted fear and accusations of making a ret…