From the middle of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth-century, Japan, through the Tokugawa Shōgunate, was successful in rigorously enforcing a policy of seclusion. No Europeans were allowed into Japan except the Dutch who were…
"The figures represented ... are engaged in manufacturing silk-twist by a very different mode to that adopted by Europeans. Their machinery is not horizontal, but vertical. The threads are extended round a truncated cone. The females who twist…