by Andrew Marr
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the similarities between Britain and Japan extended beyond the social threat of the new-fangled drug. They were similarly sized island archipelagos off a much bigger mainland, with whom they had had an uneasy relationship. Like the Scots and English, the Japanese had imported religious ideas, technologies and luxuries across a narrow sea, but had managed to keep themselves a little apart. Like Britain, Japan had only recently been united under a single ruler. In 1582, after a long period of conflict, the humbly born soldier Hideyoshi, of the Tokugawa clan, had made himself shogun. Soon, the two countries would go in diametrically opposite directions during one of the most fascinating experiments early-modern history has to offer. To start with, though, the similarities were more striking.
Hideyoshi’s years in power had shown him a ruler with the energy of England’s Queen Elizabeth. Like her, he was instinctively tolerant on the subject of religion, and for a while allowed Portuguese Jesuits to convert to Christianity any citizen who was willing. Elizabeth’s armies had fought in Holland and France against the Jesuit-influenced Spanish, with notable lack of success. Hideyoshi had organized a major attack on the Chinese empire, via Korea, which his troops devastated, but without any greater long-term success. Hideyoshi had no Japanese Shakespeare to boast of, but his reign was notable for superb castles and paintings.20 He was also famously determined to restore order and in 1588, as Elizabeth awaited the Spanish Armada, he organized a ‘sword hunt’, a mass confiscation of daggers, swords and spears from everyone except the samurai military class.
At sea, Japan’s ocean-going pirate raiders were Asia’s equivalent to Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh. The Englishmen were raiding Spanish ports and ships for gold, other luxuries and (in Hawkins’s case) slaves. From Japan’s ports famous figures like Captain Wu-Feng were submitting the Chinese to just the same kind of treatment. Both of these rising nations behaved brutally to anyone who got in their way. The Elizabethan English oppressed the indigenous Irish, while Hideyoshi’s compatriots did the same to the Ainu people of the northern islands. In economic terms, both Britain and Japan were struggling to deal with the consequences of massive deforestation and the rise of urban society: both London and Edo would soon smell very similar, choked by the fumes of coal-burning fires.21
There were many differences, of course – differences in political structure, in religion, and in the fortunes of war. Korea’s formidable fleet of cannon-toting warships had done rather better against Japan than the Spanish had against the English. There was a big difference in population, as well. Japan, with around eighteen million people, had perhaps three times as many inhabitants as Britain. She felt herself to be more self-sufficient. That English trader writing about the tobacco ban was a member of the so-called English Factory (really, a trading post) based at Hirado on the island of Kyushu, near Nagasaki. There were no Japanese traders in the West, and the European outposts in Japan would soon be gone. The Jesuits and the Dutch held on longest. The English, who had arrived in 1613, had gone within a decade, unable to make enough money out of trading.
This puzzled King James, who wrote to the Japanese emperor offering ‘amitie and friendship’. All he wanted was ‘the settling and establishing of an entercourse of commerce and trade for the mutuall good of each others’ subjects’. Though hurt at getting no reply to his first letter, James was even prepared to grovel a little: ‘Wee have not received any answere from you, which we attribute to the remoteness and distance of the places of our dominions, and not to any backwardnesse in you.’22 It was a rare and refreshing example of an early-modern European trying to see things from another point of view.
James’s Britain and the shogun of Japan, now Tokugawa Ieyasu, the next in line, faced the same crucial strategic question: how does a small island-nation thrive in a world of ever greater empires?
Britain responded by flinging outwards, building up her fleets and scattering them across the oceans, to America and the Far East. Englishmen and Scots were impelled by religious fervour, but also by the hope of profit. England’s first joint-stock company was a trading syndicate, the Muscovy Company, formed in 1555. The English East India Company got its charter from Elizabeth in 1600. Seven years later, the ‘London Company’ established the colony of Virginia. Explorers became popular heroes, and the appetite to hear all about the rest of the world, which can be tracked through plays, pamphlets and books, seems to have been insatiable. Elizabeth’s fleet had been comparatively tiny, but a reorganized Admiralty, plus industrial-scale dockyards – first at Deptford, then at Chatham and Portsmouth – were soon turning out many more ships, and larger ones too. By 1637 when the Sovereign of the Seas, with 102 guns, was launched for James’s son Charles, Britain could claim to be the possessor of the most formidable ship afloat.
The Japanese could have taken the same approach, and nearly did. From the 1580s they had been trading successfully in their armed ‘red seal’ ships around Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In 1600 an English sailor called William Adams, who had served with Drake and fought the Spanish Armada, had arrived in Japan. The Dutch ship he was on, drifting and desperate with its crew starving, had dropped anchor. Adams was rescued by Japanese fishermen and taken to the nearest authority, the future shogun, Ieyasu. For the Portuguese, who were on the way towards converting an astonishing half-million Japanese to Roman Catholicism, the arrival of a bedraggled English heretic was not welcome. With true Christian thoughtfulness, the Jesuits suggested to Ieyasu that they crucify Adams.
Instead, the open-minded ruler cross-questioned the Englishman about ships, God and mathematics, and appointed him his adviser. Ieyasu was intrigued by the idea of building up a powerful ocean fleet of his own, and in 1605 Adams oversaw the construction of two excellent European-style ocean-going ships at a new dockyard at Ito. Will Adams, from Gillingham in Kent, became Anjin-Sama, a figure well respected in Japan and remembered to this day, and a close aide to Ieyasu, the warlord who in his way was as influential in forging Japan as a single nation as James was in forging Britain. There is no reason why the seafaring and technically advanced Japanese could not soon have built fleets of galleons, just as they had already copied and improved on European muskets and cannon.
A vigorous debate was going on in Japan about which way to turn. The foreigners brought some interesting goods to trade – their gunpowder was considered good, but their cloth was terrible – and certainly had some fascinating skills. They were also, however, a source of instability, and a large part of the problem was the fastspreading success of the Christian missionaries. It is estimated that in the early seventeenth century they converted around five hundred thousand Japanese, including ordinary peasants, samurai and landowners, mostly in the south. To begin with, the shoguns were relaxed about it, but the mood changed as the Christian Japanese became troublesome. The siege of Osaka castle in 1614–15 was an epic of its kind, which set the seal on the victory of the Tokugawa as rulers of all Japan. But confronting them behind the massive walls of the fortress, alongside its owner, were thousands of determined samurai – many of them Christians, waving Christian saints’ flags.
Thanks to Adams, Ieyasu had been able to distinguish between Protestant Europeans and those rebellious Roman Catholics. Replying affably to James, he had even sent him a rather fine suit of samurai armour. But Ieyasu died suddenly, not long after the siege, possibly of syphilis or cancer, and the new shogun, his son Hidetada, was more ruthless. A purge of foreigners began, initially focused on the Jesuits but freezing all European trade. Twenty years later, in 1637, a major uprising of around thirty thousand peasants, most of them Christian, took place on the island of Kyushu. The revolt was as much about taxation and hunger as about religion, and ended after another epic siege, during which the peasants and rebel samurai held off an army vastly greater than their own. The Tokugawa were only able to suppress them with the help of ships belonging to those other (though Protestant) Christians, the Dutch.
All this w
as more than embarrassing, and it determined the Japanese view about how best to balance opportunity and risk when it came to foreign influence. Two years later came the dramatic measures known as the sakoku, or ‘locked-country’ policy. The size of Japanese ships was to be restricted by law. They could be big enough only for coastal fishing. Ocean-going ships were dismantled, and it became a capital offence to build them. Just to make sure, ships from now on had to be constructed with a large hole in the hull, making them lethal on the open seas, where a heavy swell would signal their doom – a unique instance of ships being specifically designed to sink. Japanese citizens were forbidden to leave Japan on pain of death, foreigners from entering. Christianity was outlawed, though many Japanese Christians would die rather than renounce their new faith.
Foreigners were finally expelled. When the Portuguese came back in 1640 to protest, their mission was wiped out. Though there were a very few, tightly regulated, trading links left for Korean and Dutch merchants, the country was indeed effectively locked shut. These restrictions stayed in place for more than two centuries. They are widely seen as a classic case of political idiocy. What would have happened had King James, perhaps infuriated beyond endurance by another incident of passive smoking at Westminster Palace, ordered the destruction of the British fleet and a ban on contacts with the continent? The Japanese effectively disinvented modern weaponry, too; so, by the time the US Navy (an institution unthinkable when the policy started) arrived in 1853, the Japanese had no answer to the naked threat offered by its cannon.
Yet there is another side to the story. The more than two centuries of isolation created a more intensely Japanese Japan than would have been possible otherwise. Japan’s distinctive buildings, unique traditions of art and theatre, her rituals based on tea, music, courtesans and the seasons, and her original, unusual cuisine, would have been simply ‘less so’ without the locked doors of the Tokugawa. Even today, Japan is more herself, more distinctive, than other cultures – certainly than the homogenized global culture of the modern British. Cut off from global epidemics spread by shipping and enjoying internal peace, Japan’s population grew fast, so that Edo was the world’s biggest city by the early 1700s (not that the world would have known). Guns almost disappeared. Internal unity brought an internal trade boom.
The Tokugawa-era Japanese were even able to resolve some of their most pressing environmental problems. They had been as heavily reliant as the English on timber for building – the capital Edo, largely built of wood, was half destroyed by a ‘great fire’ in 1657, nine years before the same thing happened to London. Wood needed for castles, boats and fuel, and the call for more farmland as the population boomed, had resulted in huge deforestation and erosion. Disaster loomed.
Instead, as Jared Diamond has shown, the Japanese then managed to limit their population, achieving something close to a steady state. They found alternative sources of food, above all at sea, that are still central to the Japanese diet. And they reforested. Thanks to a complicated system of rules about which wood could be used for what, charges for logging, and a growing understanding of silviculture, the Japanese forests returned. Timber was valued, a subject for connoisseurs to debate; better-off peasants knew the long-growing trees would be useful to their grandchildren; and a tough central government imposed the new rules everywhere. As compared with the destruction of forests wrought across much of Britain and then across much of America, there is at least pause for thought about which decision – to spread oneself about or to hunker down – was the wiser one.
Yet that is only half the story. The other point about Tokugawa Japan, which we will return to later, is that it was an intensely conservative and hierarchical society, which never developed the semi-democratic and more open culture of the early-modern West. Conservatism and closure probably went hand in hand. By the time Japan did rejoin the world, it was still run by a hierarchy of aristocrats with medieval views, and its citizens were trained perhaps a little too well to obey orders. This would have implications for twentieth-century history. Japan still has its punks, of course; and despite the edicts of 1612, they remain formidable smokers.
In a Nutshell to New York
The coming British world domination was not yet obvious. The failure to break into the Japanese market was matched by others. The rise of the British as a naval and trading power is now so firmly part of world history that it may come as a shock to find that in the most lucrative contest of all, they were soundly beaten by those rivals who featured in the Japanese story, the Dutch.
Very broadly, the story of European mercantile expansion can be divided into three phases. First, from the late 1400s, came the Portuguese, whose ships explored the African coast. Then, discovering that the Cape could be reached by veering off far west into the Atlantic, allowing the winds to carry them round, they got to India and the Far East. The Portuguese operated as violently monopolistic traders rather than as empire-builders, setting up fortifications to protect their sea routes and repelling all rivals. The Spanish were next to get in on the act, but did not really try to oust the Portuguese from ‘their’ routes, focusing instead, as we have seen, on the Americas. Portugal’s greatest sailor, Ferdinand Magellan, was working for the Spanish when he discovered the route round Cape Horn to South America. He died soon afterwards. One of the ships he had set out with became the first vessel to circumnavigate the world.
The second phase saw two more northerly nations, the English and the Dutch, join the adventure. To begin with they were no more consciously imperialist than the Portuguese, also being driven by merchants’ hopes of profit. Europe had long had a near-desperate desire for the spices that grew only in the East. The most delicious and (it was thought) healthful of these were to be found in the Spice Islands, wedged in the dangerous seas between Borneo and New Guinea. Nutmeg, cloves, mace, pepper and cinnamon had been bought from the islanders there by Muslim seafarers; then taken to India, thence through the Islamic world to Constantinople, and finally through Venice to Europe. A profit was made at each stage, so that the aromatic nuts and seeds were hugely expensive luxuries by the time they reached Paris or London. Yet before the advent of refrigeration, in an age of rank meat and dull eating, the appetite for them was as insatiable as it was for fur. Most spices were also thought to offer protection against illness: nutmeg was supposed to cure syphilis, and even the plague.
Meanwhile, Portuguese seamanship had found a shorter way to the Spice Islands. The journey might still take months, even years, and kill perhaps a third of the sailors who attempted it, but ships from Europe could now get direct access to the spices. Their owners would be able, in a single voyage, to make the fabulous profits that had formerly been shared by traders across half the world. The losers were the Arab and Indian traders, suddenly and brutally cut out of the chain; the markets of Constantinople became quieter and the avaricious palazzo-dwelling merchants of Venice’s Grand Canal grumbled. The next losers would be the Portuguese themselves, confronted by better-built ships and bolder adventurers, this time from the lowlands of northern Europe. In particular, the Dutch would mix seamanship and the arts of commerce that they had learned in Italy, to produce a world-changing formula.
We human beings remain, in part, quite simple animals: we love new tastes, pretty, shiny things to look at, soft things against our skins, pleasurable scents and interesting flavours. This has always been the case, but for Europe after its centuries of relative isolation it was particularly so. The Dutch were able to impose a virtual monopoly on what they called, with admirable straight speaking, the ‘rich trades’ – not only the spices but also silks and fine Japanese porcelain. The profits were huge. So, however, were the risks. Storms, piracy and spoiled cargo meant that many investors lost everything. Dividing, sharing out and selling the risk, as well as guaranteeing the system of dividing profits, led the Dutch to develop the first proper stock market.
Buying and selling paper shares was not quite new. Charles V, to raise money for his ba
ttles in the Netherlands, had produced a system of annuities, which were transferable and tradable. In Antwerp, foreign bills of exchange were bought and sold in increasingly complex ways, and when the Protestants were expelled from that city in 1585 they ended up carrying on the trade in Amsterdam. There in 1609, the Wisselbank, often seen as the world’s first central bank, opened to guarantee the value of different coinages, for a small fee. In a world of clipped and debased currencies, this offered a basic security on which more adventurous trade could stand.23
Before the Amsterdam beurs, or stock market, opened, just a year after the Wisselbank, the city’s speculators had haggled and slapped hands on its New Bridge or in nearby churches. The new building formalized the trading, and its short opening hours added an air of businesslike frenzy so familiar to later traders; soon hundreds of different commodities were being bought and sold. Like the first central bank, the first joint-stock company was founded in Amsterdam, and in a remarkably short time the Dutch had developed all the essentials of a secure and flexible source of funding that individual English aristocrats, British monarchs or the courts of Spain and Portugal simply could not match.
The ‘rich trades’ involved almost miraculous acts of seamanship and courage. Rival Europeans tried to batter their way through the Arctic ice or penetrate the Canadian wilderness, still looking for a shorter way to the aromatic islands. In London, they tried to mimic the Dutch by founding their own East India Company, but the British discovered, not for the last time, that it is hard to be second into a new market. The Dutch were dug in, determined and utterly ruthless. In a series of vicious battles, heroic sieges, squalid deals and barbarous betrayals they would eventually capture the Spice Islands – and much of the rest of the Far Eastern trade – for themselves. The Dutch businessmen realized that to repel rivals, they would need forts, protected warehouses, secure anchorages and a permanent arrangement with the local rulers whose produce they were after. This meant that the Dutch – even though they were God-fearing republicans – were turning themselves into imperialists. The third phase had arrived. Today’s Indonesia became their Far Eastern base, with a new, Dutch, capital, ‘Batavia’.
