The Merchant's Tale

by Simon Partner

  What would Chūemon and his family think of the society they now look down upon? Chūemon’s younger sons and their children came of age in Yokohama, Japan’s main point of connection to global networks of trade and culture. Naotarō and his family stayed in Yokohama even after Chūemon returned to his home village. They are the products of Japan’s new age of global modernity. I suspect they would look approvingly on the astounding growth and prosperity of Yokohama and Tokyo in the intervening century and a half. As for Higashi-Aburakawa, Naotarō and his family members may well look down on the Shinohara family home and be thankful that they got away!

  For Chūemon and Shōjirō, there are many aspects of village life that they would not find much changed. The family still farms its five acres of land. Now, instead of wheat and cotton, the land is planted with peaches; no doubt Chūemon would have recognized the economic expediency of developing this new, high value-added crop. The house is still there, barely modernized—though two shiny cars now sit in the graveled driveway in front. Mr. Shinohara, the current occupant of the house, could probably chat happily with his great-great-grandfather about local families, about the crops and the weather, and—of course—about the failings of the government. Chūemon had his great adventure, and for a while he transformed his fortunes and those of his fellow villagers. But in the end he came home to the land of his forebears and resumed the farming activities of his youth; and today he rests with his ancestors and descendants in the Senryūji cemetery. He has become a part of the landscape that he helped to shape.

  Judging by his elaborate gravestone, Chūemon must have been celebrated in the village even in his lifetime. He had had, after all, extraordinary experiences, and in his time he had been a wealthy man. Today, he is remembered still as one of the pioneers of the Yokohama trading community. The survival of his letters has assured him a permanent place in the historical record—even the occasional foreigner now comes to his village to see what they can find out about him. Did he go to the grave unhappy, or frustrated by his failure to make a lasting fortune? I think not. Surrounded by his descendants, close to his comfortable old house amid the peach fields, Shinohara Chūemon is, I think, at peace.

  CONCLUSION

  THE POWER OF A PLACE

  Ever since I began studying modern Japanese history twenty-five years ago, I have been fascinated by the overwhelming speed of change during Japan’s relatively brief modern era. From the dramatic political revolution of 1868, to the sweeping Meiji reforms, to the nation’s rapid modernization and industrialization, to its military adventures and imperial wars, to the all-out conflict and shattering defeat of the 1940s, to recovery and the postwar “economic miracle,” just about every generation in Japan’s one-hundred-fifty-year modern history has experienced dramatic social change. What can the stories of Chūemon and Yokohama teach us about the broader historical trends of Japan’s tumultuous modern era?

  Much of the focus of historians who study the 1860s has understandably been on the political upheavals that culminated in the Meiji Restoration. Virtually all the developments of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries—industrialization, militarization, imperialism, fascism, high economic growth, constitutional democracy—can be interpreted in the light of this momentous political transformation. Was the restoration a triumph—as its earliest apologists maintained—of Japanese national identity and loyalty to Japan’s ancient imperial institution? Was it, as the Marxist scholars of the mid-twentieth century argued, a bourgeois revolution born of rising commercial wealth? And if so, how did this emerging democracy allow itself to be hijacked by a semifeudal, militaristic oligarchy?1 Was it, as populist historians of the postwar period argued, a nascent people’s revolution in which even farmers drafted idealistic constitutions to circulate among their village networks—until their aspirations were choked off by the iron fist of imperial autocracy?2 Or was it, as some American academics argued, a catalyst for successful modernization—building on the legacies of the Tokugawa era, hijacked for a while by wartime militarists, and now realizing true fruition with the advent of American-style democracy?3

  Chūemon was a child of the Tokugawa social and political order, and it treated him well. It gave him a privileged status in a relatively stable village society; it gave him opportunities for education and for advancement within the shogunal bureaucracy; it permitted agricultural and commercial expansion, from which as an elite farmer-merchant he directly benefited; and it opened up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of moving to the new international port of Yokohama, where Chūemon dreamed of a new and brilliant prosperity for himself and his region. Although he complained at times about the taxes imposed on him, and although there was clearly an element of fear in his relationship with the shogunate (for example, he was terrified of being arrested after the Mitsui scandal erupted in late 1867), Chūemon never expressed any sentiment implying disloyalty or dislike of the shogun or the shogunal system. And after the system collapsed, he frequently expressed concern over the reforms that were enacted one after another: “If possible, I wish they could just leave things as they were.” In this sense, Chūemon’s story resonates less with interpretations of the Meiji Restoration that focus on revolutionary fervor, whether of antiforeign samurai or people’s rights activists, and more with those that focus on rising commercial wealth and protoindustrial antecedents to economic modernity.

  Indeed, the story of Chūemon confirms the continuity, strength, and flexibility of Japan’s growing commercial economy across the Tokugawa–Meiji divide. Commercial crop production had been increasing since the mid-eighteenth century to meet the growing demands of the urban centers. In particular, cotton and silk had already become vital sources of cash income to farmers in Edo’s rural hinterland. Trading networks had developed to connect small- and medium-scale farmers with sources of credit for the growing season, to organize the purchase of their raw silk and cotton, to process the materials into thread or cloth in farm households or in small factories, and to transport the thread to regional markets where it was purchased by major urban wholesalers. Largely as a result of these commercial developments, a class of farmer-merchant-landlords, the gōnō, had developed in villages throughout the Kantō region—men, like Chūemon, who combined farming, village leadership, and regional commercial, financial, and even manufacturing activities. Using their advantages of local political influence, regional networking, market and product knowledge, and growing capital strength, the gōnō had by the mid-1850s become a protocapitalist class that was well placed to take advantage of the explosive growth opportunities offered by Japan’s opening to foreign markets. In this sense, the opening of Yokohama highlights the underlying continuity of Japan’s economic trajectory, and it helps explain Japan’s rapid adaptation to the modernizing forces of capitalism and industrialization. Indeed, without the development of such sophisticated commercial and manufacturing networks, Yokohama might not have been the economic success story that it was.

  The argument that Japan’s commercial and industrial success in the modern era built on solid economic foundations laid in the Tokugawa era was proposed by Furushima Toshio and Thomas Smith in the 1950s and further developed by Saitō Osamu and Hayami Akira, who analyzed Japan’s “industrious revolution” in the later Tokugawa period as a precursor to the industrial revolution of the 1890s and beyond.4 More recently, Kären Wigen, David Howell, and Edward Pratt have further developed this thesis with detailed studies of economic change across the Tokugawa–Meiji divide. While these studies richly illustrate the growth of commerce and rural manufacturing during the late Tokugawa era, they also point to the radical disruptions caused by Japan’s changing economic structure as well as by the sudden opening of Japan to international trade and modern economic competition. Pratt’s nuanced study of the gōnō rural elite points to the destabilizing effects of Japan’s rapid commercial development both before and after Japan’s integration into global markets: “Japan’s protoindustrial economy was far more volatile,
indeed far more dynamic, than portrayed in most studies to date … A combination of factors—government policy, crop failures, competition, market fluctuations, and household dynamics—hurtled many rural families into decline.” Wigen focuses more squarely on the impact of Japan’s opening to international trade, describing how the Ina valley in Shinshū province “was slowly knit into a cohesive economic region, only to be unraveled and reworked into a very different fabric when the Japanese countryside was incorporated into a globalizing economy.”5

  Similarly, Chūemon’s story illustrates both the powerful legacies of Tokugawa-era commercial expansion and the radical transformation that accompanied the opening of Yokohama and other ports to trade, over which the Japanese government had limited control. Chūemon’s home province of Kōshū saw a vast increase in commercial activity after the opening of Yokohama, with silk production increasing fourfold between 1863 and 1868. The expansion brought enormous opportunities for entrepreneurial merchants and village producers, who not only expanded their income by growing, purchasing, and reselling cotton and silk but also invested in production facilities to spin thread of a high enough quality to sell in the export market. Given that prices also increased very substantially, the expansion of the silk and cotton markets also benefited countless small-scale producers. In addition to silk, cotton, and silkworm egg cards, significant shipments of charcoal, building supplies, fruit, and medicines from Kōshū to Yokohama are also evident in the course of Chūemon’s letters. For many farm families, this commercial growth must have led to significantly greater prosperity. However, at the same time, the rapid transformations of the local marketplace caused disruption for both merchants and farmers. Of the established silk merchants in Kōfu at the turn of the 1860s, only one survived the decade. The others were replaced by aggressive entrepreneurial newcomers—men who, like Chūemon, were confident enough to respond quickly to new market opportunities and willing to take huge risks in order to leverage their limited capital. Looking beyond the Yokohama–Kōshū region, the radical shifts in supply and demand brought about by the opening of Yokohama initiated a long-term decline in the established textile industries of Kyoto and the Kansai region and an irrevocable shift in economic power to eastern Japan. In this context, Chūemon’s story confirms and conforms to an increasingly confident historiography of economic continuity and change in nineteenth-century Japan.

  More broadly, the stories of Chūemon and Yokohama suggest an approach to the study of the Meiji Restoration era that deemphasizes the role of nation-building elites and throws sharper focus on the agency of small-scale actors: farmers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and opportunists. The striking feature of many of the transformations described in this book is that they were not the result of political revolution, nor the work of the great leaders of the Meiji Restoration or their elite allies—the actors to whom scholars have credited much of the agency in Japan’s transformation into a modern industrial and imperialist power.6 Rather, they were the product of Japan’s rapid integration into global flows of goods and ideas, mediated by the vibrant commercial marketplace of Yokohama and through the efforts of countless small-scale entrepreneurs like Chūemon.

  Several studies of the restoration era focus on the agency of relatively unknown individuals. Anne Walthall and Laura Nenzi have written about the political activism of educated women in the final years of the Tokugawa era; Romulus Hillsborough has studied the restoration through the eyes of Katsu Kaishū, who, although a famous statesman of the Meiji era, was a relatively helpless onlooker to many of the key events of the 1860s; Neil Waters has written about the quiet adaptation of local elites to political change in the Kawasaki region, close to Yokohama; and William Steele has studied popular opinion in the late Tokugawa era through the lens of farmers’ diaries and printed broadsheets.7 While these studies offer fascinating new perspectives on the transformation of political consciousness at the grassroots level, they remain focused primarily on the political instability, ideology, intrigue, and activism that have been the subject of most scholarship on the restoration era.8 By contrast, the story of Chūemon draws our attention to the importance of mundane profit seeking in the transformations of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras.

  Equally important to this study is the transformative influence of the treaty port itself. Studies of nineteenth-century Japan have not generally focused on the treaty ports, other than as side actors in the political dramas of the period or as exotic (and sometimes nostalgic) outposts of European society.9 One exception is Michael Auslin’s study, which highlights the diplomatic responses of the Tokugawa regime to foreign pressure, emphasizing the relative success of the regime in negotiating the parameters of trade and sovereignty in the treaty ports.10 Auslin’s argument is a salutary response to the emphasis by W. G. Beasley and others on the agency of foreign imperialism, and it is also noteworthy for its contrast with the historiography of nineteenth-century China, which tends to analyze the semicolonial power of foreign merchant and diplomatic communities in the treaty ports as a major factor in the decline and eventual collapse of the Qing regime.11 But Auslin has little to say about the urban spaces of the treaty ports themselves, nor on the economic, technological, and cultural impacts of the trade and interactions that took place there. In this book, I have explored some of the ways in which the new urban space of Yokohama—its layout, neighborhoods, architecture, rhythms of daily life, cultural production, commercial transactions, rituals, and physical interactions—was a catalyst for widespread social, economic, and cultural change going far beyond its own confines.12 Beyond the economic opportunity and disruption that have been the theme of so much of this book, the dual narratives of Chūemon and Yokohama suggest a number of other vectors of transformation, each of which I have traced in the body of the book.

  First, Yokohama was a conduit for technology and ideas. During the course of the 1860s and beyond, the treaty port was Japan’s major point of connection with global flows of culture and technology. Novel artifacts were on display in the warehouses and homes of the foreign merchant community, and most were for sale. Steamships, silk-spinning equipment, cameras, beer and milk, Enfield and Minié rifles, manufactured cloth, telegraph equipment, railway locomotives, and a host of other goods were available to Japanese—and most found a ready market. Chūemon himself was an intermediary in some of these transactions, dabbling in foreign household equipment, food and drink, and textiles for sale in the Kōshū market. Others were on display as models for possible emulation: hospitals, pharmacies, post offices, banks, law courts, currencies, joint stock companies, churches, military organizations, newspapers, racecourses, and hotels. Again, all of these found keen students, and many were either imitated or purchased outright (including expert staff) for introduction in the Edo/Tokyo area and later throughout Japan. Others were more abstract and speculative: artistic styles, political philosophies, mathematics and physics, music and dancing.

  In the eyes of the Japanese, Yokohama was a showcase of glamorous consumption. Its exciting new technologies, models of prosperity, exotic and unfamiliar lifestyles—all were on public display, much as the treasures of the modern age were exhibited in the great department stores of American and European cities. Like those department stores, Yokohama was as much about display as about consumption. Many of the goods were beyond the reach of all but a privileged few, but just seeing them—or viewing images and text about them in the guidebooks and woodblock prints that circulated widely during the 1860s—taught the viewers about the possibilities of modern life and paved the way for future changes in lifestyles.

  Second, Yokohama contributed to the upending of status hierarchies in Japan of the 1860s. The East Asian treaty ports—including Yokohama—represented a unique space because they transcended national regimes. They were both global and liminal, sites where many of the normal rules and authority structures were suspended. The treaty ports were indeed in many ways places of radical equalization. Who you had been—your status i
n the Japanese class system or indeed your class and national identity as a foreigner—mattered less than the energy and enterprise you could bring to the economic opportunities created by the booming commercial center.

  The elite Edo merchants whom the shogunal government had intended as the mainstay of the new mercantile community did not generally thrive there. The house of Mitsui, for example, opened its Yokohama branch only under strong government pressure, and although it played a major (though scandal-ridden and at times ruinous) role as customs collector and foreign-exchange broker, it never developed an important business in commodity trade. Meanwhile, the shogunal government itself spent much of the decade trying to thwart trade and restrict any further expansion of the ports—even to close the port of Yokohama itself—and found its authority undermined as it failed in most of its objectives.

  By contrast, the “big three” merchants who dominated 50 percent of Yokohama’s silk trade by the end of the 1860s all came from provincial or rural backgrounds. Indeed, the sometimes radically new circumstances of trade in Yokohama—unprecedented demand, uneven supply chains, market disruptions caused by distant and uncontrollable events, and the needs of aggressive foreign merchants with little respect for existing hierarchies—favored merchants who were flexible, entrepreneurial, and ambitious. Chūemon, an extremely undercapitalized merchant with few inherent competitive advantages, prospered precisely because of his neediness, determination to take advantage of any opportunity, and great appetite for risk.