The Kanagawa commissioners assigned lots in an area roughly twelve acres in extent. Merchants were responsible for grading the land and building their own premises. The lots in the Japanese town were arrayed over rice fields and marshland, between the Benten shrine and what had previously been Hongō village. The layout of the town was in five neighborhoods (chō) organized around two intersecting avenues, known at the time as Ō-dōri and Honchō-dōri. Each of these avenues was sixty feet wide, creating a very grand space, far removed from the image many Westerners might have had of the crowded alleyways of an Asian city. The Edo merchants were located closest to the shrine, which was a strange choice since, although this area had the largest lots and the lovely grounds of the shrine as a backdrop, it was also the furthest from the docks, the foreign settlement, and the government’s administrative center.
Meanwhile, the commissioners themselves were responsible for constructing all the administrative buildings, including two large stone piers, a customs house and a town hall, roads and streets, a few residences to get the foreigners started, and of course their own headquarters and residences. The commissioners completed their master plan for construction of the port on March 26, 1859—at which point there were only three months to go until the official opening. For their own headquarters, the commissioners selected a site high up on Noge hill in Tobe village, across a small inlet from the main town beyond the Benten shrine. The commissioners deliberately located their headquarters far from the center of the town, partly to keep their activities secret from the foreigners but also because the hilly location afforded the sort of prominence traditionally claimed by the castles of feudal lords—indicating dominance of the surrounding districts. The piers and customs house were the centerpieces of their city plan—the latter was a large building located in the center of the port district, on the waterfront and between the two stone piers. The two-story building measured 1 chō (about 360 feet) on each side, for a total of 130,000 square feet. It was surrounded by a small moat and accessed by a huge wooden gate that was closed at night.17 The commissioners administered the affairs of the entire Kanagawa region (which comprised the post station of Kanagawa and 206 other towns and villages) from their Tobe headquarters—including collection of the land tax (which they used to fund their operations), local village administration, road building and maintenance, and regional justice. Meanwhile, the commissioners handled the business of Yokohama and its trade at the customs house and surrounding offices. They also maintained a small office in the town of Kanagawa.18
FIGURE 1.3 Map of Yokohama (ca. 1860). The Japanese quarter is on the right side, and the Benten shrine is the wooded area at right. The customs house and government buildings are in the center, and the foreign settlement is on the left. The brothel quarter is the moated area at the top. J. Hoffmann, “Yokohama, de nieuwe japansche haven en handelsplaats nabij Yedo,” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië (August 1862): 415–32
The commissioners also built a new road connecting Yokohama to Kanagawa and beyond. In order to enter Yokohama, a traveler would have to cross one of two bridges, “Each … protected by a gate, shut at sunset, and by a guard-house, in which yakunin [officials] were always on duty to watch who entered or left the settlement, examine the luggage, bundles or parcels, and to see that they conveyed nothing contraband in or out.”19
Even with all these preparations, one part of the plan remained to be implemented. The commissioners envisioned a community in which the foreigners would be able to fulfill all their needs—whether for food, souvenirs, entertainment, or sex—without ever having to leave Yokohama. In order to service the carnal desires of the foreigners, the government designated a marshy area outside the town of Yokohama as a brothel quarter.
Hitherto, foreigners residing in Japan had been able to purchase sexual services only under special dispensation from the government. In Nagasaki, Dutch merchants were not permitted into the town’s houses of entertainment, but they were allowed to receive women on the island of Dejima where they lived. America’s first consul, Townsend Harris, and his secretary, Henry Heusken, were assigned women (in the case of Harris, the famed Tōjin Okichi, who has since been the subject of many Japanese dramas, Kabuki plays, and films), but only as an exceptional policy and under the fiction that they were nurses to help the foreigners through times of sickness. Meanwhile, the diplomatic staff who took up residence in Edo were allowed to keep women, but in the guise of domestic servants.20 Indeed, the idea of providing a special quarter to supply young Japanese women to the foreigners was deeply sensitive and might be seen as a humiliating concession.
However, the commissioners also recognized that by providing sexual services to foreigners, they would be able to exercise a measure of control. Based on their experiences in Hakodate and Shimoda (two ports that had been resupplying foreign ships since the mid-1850s), the commissioners recognized the danger of drunken sailors causing disturbances: “We have heard of repeated incidents in which foreign sailors, from their extreme boredom, enter the shops of merchants, steal liquor, and then go on a drunken rampage.”21 The commissioners reasoned that an officially monitored entertainment quarter would reduce unregulated contact between foreign sailors and the townspeople and prevent “major trouble arising from a trivial cause.”22
The plan for the Yokohama entertainment district was to “open houses of prostitution on the same lines as those in [Edo’s] Yoshiwara.”23 Like Edo’s famous Yoshiwara licensed quarter, Yokohama’s district would be separated from the residential areas of the town, it would be walled and guarded, and the brothel houses it contained would be strictly licensed and regulated. This was in contrast to nearby Kanagawa, where the prostitutes were located in teahouses lining the Tōkaidō highway in the town center.
The Kanagawa commissioners invited the brothel owners of Kanagawa and Shinagawa to apply for land grants on a twelve-acre site at a distance from the new town. As with the Edo merchants, the commissioners applied a mixture of incentive and arm-twisting to persuade the brothel owners to build the quarter at their own expense. The cost of construction was enormous: the designated area was in the middle of a marsh, which had to be drained before any construction could take place. Costs were so high that almost all the contractors pulled out before the project was completed. In the end only one man, a brothel owner from Shinagawa called Satō Sakichi, stayed to complete the project. Sakichi managed and financed the draining of the marsh, built the houses, and built a main gate and bridge, a moat, and an eleven-hundred-foot-long wooden causeway across the marsh to connect the district to the town of Yokohama.
The licensed quarter was still not ready at the beginning of July, when the port opened for foreign trade. As a temporary measure, the Kanagawa commissioners converted an unoccupied building in the foreign settlement to serve as a makeshift brothel.24 On July 7, the commissioners issued a directive to the town leaders of Kanagawa and other well-known brothel districts along the highway: “We are asking all the restaurant owners and innkeepers to contribute women proportionate to their numbers so that we can complete this urgent task.”25 The leader of the association of Kanagawa brothel owners was instructed to “urgently recruit fifty women.” However, according to one report, “the girls who were sent to Yokohama cried bitterly, and several of them fled” rather than be sent to service the sexual needs of the foreigners.26 According to one diarist, “The prostitutes of Kanagawa were summoned to work in the brothels of Yokohama, but no one volunteered to move there. So they held a lottery and selected thirty women. They were all crying, and when it came time to go, they had to be forced into palanquins that were then roped shut.”27 When interviewed, one of the women lamented, “We do not plan to be prostitutes for our whole lives. In the coming years we hope to gain the status of wives. If we meet with harm at the hands of the foreigners, it will be a shame that will last our entire lives.”28
In spite of coercion and resistance, delays, cost overloads, bureaucra
tic confusion, diplomatic disputes, and the last-minute nature of the construction program, the four major components of the Yokohama port town—the official buildings and infrastructure, the Japanese merchant quarter, the foreign settlement, and the licensed entertainment district—were all more or less ready for business by July 1.
Among the Japanese merchants racing to open their shops on time was Chūemon. He and his business partner, Gorōemon, received their lease on April 16. Their original plan had been to open a shop together, under joint ownership and management. To that end, they had planned to request a 21,000-square-foot (600 tsubo) lot. But the lease they ultimately received was for only 11,000 square feet (312.5 tsubo), on which they would build two separate shops and sublet land for a third shop. At some point along the way, Chūemon and Gorōemon had made the decision to operate independently of each other. Most likely this was because of financial considerations. Perhaps when it came right down to it, they were unable to work out an equitable ownership scheme for an operation that was jointly managed by two people but financed by a whole community. The legal framework of the joint stock company was not available to them, nor were the safeguards of a partnership agreement. The only model in widespread use was that of one-to-one loans and mortgages. In the end, this was the arrangement that they adopted.
Their ventures were nevertheless closely connected. Gorōemon and Chūemon continued collaborating throughout the following decade, and their relationship seems to have remained cordial. Their businesses were on the same lot, so they might have been seen from the outside as a single entity—especially since both proprietors called their shops by the same name, Kōshūya, or “House of Kōshū.” The shops were of equal size: 3,600 square feet (102 tsubo). Each occupied 24 feet (4 ken) of frontage side by side on Honchō-dōri and stretched 150 feet (25 ken) to the back of the lot. The third shop on their lot, built by another Kōshū merchant, Gunnaiya Kōemon, was the same width but only 54 feet (9 ken) deep. The space behind Gunnaiya remained empty.29
It may seem strange to have had two shops with the same name sitting side by side. But the policy of the commissioners was to group merchants as much as possible by place of origin. There seems to have been an assumption that merchants from similar areas would collaborate as well as compete. On a map prepared by Mitsui in 1859, the three Kōshū shops are simply lumped together as “Kōshū merchants.” The same applied to lots owned by merchants from Hodogaya, Kanagawa, Shinagawa, and Shibau.30
On April 26, 1859, Chūemon picked up the official lease documents for his property at the commissioners’ office in Edo, and he set out for Kanagawa. Soon after arriving, he wrote to a builder he knew in Kōshū and asked him to help with construction of his shop. “In Kanagawa there are no builders, and lumber is expensive, so I would like to have these materials prepared in Kawauchi in Kōshū and sent down by boat. Please talk to Shirōji and others at Kawauchi and discuss what supplies will be needed.” Kawauchi was in a mountainous area on the edge of the Kōfu plain and was rich in timber and other natural resources.31
Chūemon succeeded in contracting with his builder, arranging for the shipment of construction materials down the Fuji River and around the Izu Peninsula to Yokohama, hiring local labor for the construction project (even when every other resident of Yokohama had a construction project under way), and completing his shop by June 1, 1859, in plenty of time for the opening of the port. Chūemon’s building project seems to have gone quicker than most. The commissioners’ office summoned all the Yokohama merchants for a conference on June 1 to scold those whose buildings remained unfinished. The only shops that were complete were Chūemon’s Kōshūya and Mitsui’s Echigoya. “Even though I was late in renting my land, I got to work quickly and made good progress with the construction, and so I was successful. Both of us received praise for this … Around sixty other [merchants] were scolded and sternly told to finish the construction as soon as possible.”32
Chūemon hired a young man from his village named Yaemon as his assistant. For his initial stock of goods, Chūemon relied on two business partners, Matsujirō in Higashi-Aburakawa and Genzaemon from Kurokoma village, to get the word out that he was accepting produce on commission from Kōshū merchants. They sent him supplies of silk from the Gunnai region, cotton cloth, dried grapes, and tobacco.33 On June 29, Chūemon wrote, “The foreign ships will arrive on the third of next month [July 2, 1859], and everyone has been told to try their utmost to prepare their goods by that time … We have been told by the commissioners not to despise the foreigners and to put our best goods on display.”34
THE PORT OPENS
The new port of Yokohama opened for business on the stipulated date, July 1, 1859.
The Japanese were more or less ready, but the town could hardly be called lively. Only two foreign ships were in the port: one Dutch and one American. According to an early Japanese visitor, “The goods [for sale] were expensive and few transactions were taking place. The foreigners came to look at the goods, but they went back [to their ships] without buying anything. Moreover, Yokohama was a sad [looking] place … the construction was still not complete, and so the foreigners stayed away, going instead to stay in the temples of Kanagawa.”35 Another early report stated, “About 70 to 80 percent of the shops on Honchō-dōri are complete, but the others are still under construction.”36 Henry Holmes, captain of one of the first merchant ships to arrive in the new port, found “no pilot … no buoys to mark the proper channel, nor … any light to direct … I found no shipping or native craft in the place, nor were we boarded by any officials.”37 A Dutch merchant, “Cees” de Coningh, wrote,
Upon our arrival, there was absolutely no trace of town or city to be discerned, no matter how close we came to the shore to drop anchor. The only preparation made for the arrival of foreigners was a large wooden building that the Japanese called their Interpreters’ Office surrounded by a sextet of sheds, the whole encircled with palisades, and further beyond these sheds stood four little sentry boxes, which could best be compared to our waffle stalls. Otherwise, one could see nothing else nearby save for the cultivated fields between the lovely trees of the farmers’ and fishermen’s houses of the real village of Yokohama.38
The foreign quarter consisted of “a few dozen wooden bungalows with matching warehouses on nearby farmland from which the harvest had been completed; they were strewn chaotically across the uprooted turnip fields as if they had been shaken out of a box of children’s toys.” Beyond those, “wheat and turnips still lay on the ground of the terrain of the new foreign quarter.”39
Sir Rutherford Alcock, the British envoy to Japan, formed a more favorable impression of Yokohama, which he visited soon after its opening:
It was impossible not to be struck with the admirable and costly structures of granite which the Japanese had so rapidly raised, in a large broad pier running far into the bay, and a long flight of steps, at which twenty boats might land their passengers or cargoes at the same time. Immediately in front was a large official-looking building, which was pointed out as the custom-house, and thither we proceeded to find some of the officials and an interpreter. The gate gave entrance into a courtyard, paved with stones from the beach, and round the four sides were ranges of offices, some evidently still in the carpenters’ hands.
To the southwest of the piers and customs house, out of a marsh by the edge of a deserted bay, a wave of the conjuror’s wand had created a considerable and bustling settlement of Japanese merchants. A large wide street was bordered on both sides with handsome, well-built houses of timber and mud walls. But the occupants had evidently only that very morning been precipitated in; their goods were still for the greater part unpacked; while frantic efforts were being made by servants and porters, in a state of deliquescence, to make some sort of show of the salable contents.40
Alcock nevertheless found the shops full of “goods entirely selected to suit a foreigner’s wants and tastes … lacquer, basket-work, porcelain and bronze, fancy silks and embr
oideries, spread out in every tempting form.”41 Alcock wanted to buy a pair of dogs—this seems to have been a popular purchase among early diplomats—and he looked for them in a street that specialized in livestock. Here he found goats, bears, deer, storks, and many other varieties of birds. Perhaps hearing of the foreign sailors’ fascination with sea creatures, one enterprising craftsman had sewn together a preserved monkey’s torso and a large fish tail to make a strikingly realistic mermaid, “as natural and lifelike as any dried mummy!”42
The American merchant Francis Hall, a keen observer and diarist who arrived in Yokohama in November 1859, described the shops as
under buildings of one and two stories, the fronts being open to the street. The goods were arranged on shelves or stood in boxes on a single platform or series of ascending platforms. The platform that constituted the main floor was spread with mats, fresh and clean. On the mats were squatted the sellers around a brazier of charcoal fire, smoking, talking, or drinking tea. Wherever I stopped, goods were freely shown and I was often invited to a cup of tea, or proffered some eatable like sweetmeats, cakes, or nuts … Each store had, as with us, its own class of merchandise. Silks and spices, goods, lacquered ware, porcelain, provisions, had each their own place.43
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