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If the foreign policy of the First Empire was scarcely interested in East Asia, the Napoleonic wars conducted in the European theater did nonetheless have far-reaching repercussions by the naval conflict in which Napoleonic France and its Dutch allies were engaged in the Indian Ocean. Farther east, the Dutch trading post of Dejima – Japan’s only window on the West – tried, as best it could, to maintain itself, in difficult circumstances where the shogun government, stubbornly adhering to the policy of closing the archipelago, had to protect itself both from British covetousness concerning Dejima in the south and from the Russian push on Japan’s northern margins. It was through the regular but incomplete reports that the director of the trading post sent to Edo, the shogun capital, and through these sporadic and conflicting contacts that the Bakufu grew aware of the evolution of the balance of power in Europe, of the emergence of Great Britain as a major maritime power, and of the still little known figure of Napoleon.