The Merchant's Tale

by Simon Partner

  The overturning of traditional elite hierarchies glimpsed in the rise of provincial silk merchants like Chūemon was mirrored in the broader undermining of the warrior-based caste hierarchy that underpinned so much of the Tokugawa political system. The multiple crises of the 1860s, many of which were directly or indirectly caused by the opening of Yokohama, led to radical responses such as the raising of commoner militias, the promotion of low-ranking warriors and even peasants to senior domainal roles, and the abandonment of the centuries-old alternate attendance system.

  For men like Chūemon, the Yokohama trade nevertheless opened up hitherto undreamed-of opportunities for economic and social advancement. It is not a coincidence that while Yokohama grew during the 1860s into a thriving city, Edo itself went into a steep decline, losing half its population. Chūemon’s dream of becoming guardian of a daimyo’s mansion and installing his family there is emblematic of this extraordinary reversal. The immediate causes of Edo’s decline included the abandonment of the alternate attendance system and the release of hostage daimyo families and their retainers back to their provincial homes; the shogunate’s massive military campaigns in western Japan; and, ultimately, the collapse of the Edo-based Tokugawa regime. But in the background was the shogunate’s inability to profit from the enormous opportunities generated by foreign relations and commerce. In spite of the very real threat posed by foreign imperialism, a more skillful manipulation of these opportunities might have brought solutions to the shogunate’s financial problems, as well as potentially transforming its military technologies. Some of the more far-sighted shogunal administrators recognized this from the beginning and actively sought to tie Japan’s opening to the fortunes of the Kantō region. But a combination of antiforeign pressure from the court and domains and the shogunate’s own innate conservatism pushed the government to pursue instead antitrade policies, with the goal of closing down the port. Instead of rising with the tide of profitable foreign trade, Edo became increasingly isolated and hollowed out. When the new imperial capital of Tokyo began to reassert its dominance in the 1870s, its recovery was greatly helped by a close political and economic alliance with Yokohama and its foreign communities. Indeed, it is from this point that we can see the fusion of Yokohama and Tokyo as the mutually dependent hubs of Japan’s new global political economy—a fusion that led ultimately to the Keihin megalopolis that we know today.

  Third, the opening of Yokohama also brought about a complex but ultimately momentous shift in the perceptions and realities of space and time. Yokohama and the other treaty ports were unique spaces in the Japan of the 1860s. In addition to looking inward onto the domestic political and economic landscapes, they also faced outward onto global networks of commerce and power. The ships docking in the harbor brought not only foreign goods but also news, knowledge, people, and culture from every part of the globe. To be exposed to the Yokohama trade was to plug into a network in which values, power relations, priorities, and hierarchies were at times very differently structured from those prevailing domestically. Inevitably, the merchants and others who occupied the domestic space of Yokohama came to see the world—both outside Japan and within—quite differently.

  One example is a new spatial perspective that often foregrounded global movements over local. The letters of Chūemon indicate an intense interest in market movements, many of which were triggered by events taking place thousands of miles away. Although Chūemon may not have reflected deeply on the causes of these distant events, nor on the inherent interconnectedness of global politics and economics, he was intensely aware that movements in the global market could have a profound impact on events and opportunities in his home province. For example, Chūemon recognized immediately that the Battle of Sedan, fought thousands of miles away, spelled the end of the boom in silkworm egg cards, which had been his most important item of trade for the past five years. By contrast, the immense drama of the Meiji Restoration—an event that reverberates to this day in Japan’s history—while it alarmed and frightened Chūemon for a while, did little to disturb the tenor of commerce and daily life in Yokohama. Nor was Chūemon alone in being affected more by distant events than those nearby. Even village families living in remote mountain valleys were now—via the global node of Yokohama—vulnerable to the consequences of distant disruptions to markets they had come to depend on for their livelihood.

  In the same way that we see a shifting perception of space as a result of the opening of Yokohama to global trade, we can also observe a transformation in perceptions of time. Foreign observers of the Japanese often commented on their lack of urgency: “The value of time never entered into their thoughts; and even in business operations, one of the greatest annoyances of European merchants was the difficulty, I may say the impossibility, of keeping them up to time in fulfilling their engagements.”13 But Japanese observers were fascinated by time and the role that it played in the daily lives of Westerners. Woodblock prints and guidebooks to Yokohama often portrayed clocks and pocket watches, and contemporary photographs show Japanese subjects prominently holding up pocket watches as symbols of their embrace of technological modernity.

  In a family photograph taken in 1872, Chūemon’s son Naotarō is indeed holding up a pocket watch. But Chūemon’s interest in time, and his understanding of its value, long predates that photo. From his earliest days in the port, Chūemon was intensely aware that when it came to the transmission of information or the transport of goods, time was money. And as his business developed, he was willing to spend liberally to buy access to the fastest available services, sending runners up the Kōshū highway at ever increasing speeds.

  If faster means such as horse-drawn carriages, steam trains, rickshaws, or the electric telegraph had been available during the 1860s, Chūemon would surely have embraced these new technologies and even exerted himself to introduce them into his home province. A generation later Aizawa Kikutarō, mayor of Aihara in Kanagawa prefecture, worked for a decade to bring a railway station to his home village in the belief that it would transform the local economy (which it did).14 But during the time Chūemon was in business, neither railway nor telegraph was a realistic option, and even horse-drawn carts were forbidden on the Japanese highways. As Rutherford Alcock wrote in 1863, even “with some of the best roads in the world, they are three centuries behind the rest of the civilized world in all that concerns speed and means of communication.”15 Japan was to catch up very quickly, but by the time the telegraph was introduced between Yokohama and Kōshū, Chūemon was already retired from his trading business.

  Even if he had still been in business, he may not have profited from the new communication and transport technologies. During the 1860s, Chūemon was able to gain a few days over his competitors by sending information up the highway by fast runner. But with the arrival of the telegraph, access to rapid communications became available to anyone with the money to send a wire. At that point it would have been much harder for Chūemon to steal a march on his competitors. From now on, the competitive advantage gravitated to the concerns with the greatest financial clout. They had the resources to hold on to whatever information advantage was still available—through technological investment, systems of regional agents, and international correspondents—and also to secure economies of scale that, in an otherwise equal playing field, might have made the difference between failure and lasting success.

  Fourth, the treaty port created a new sense of Japanese identity, both within Japan and globally. The surviving archive of Chūemon’s life indicates clearly that his main objective was to make money, both for himself and for his business network in Kōshū. Politics was relevant mostly to the extent that it contributed to economic opportunity or threat. During the course of Chūemon’s first decade in Yokohama, the town and its trade were repeatedly threatened by confrontations between antiforeign agitators, the shogunal authorities, and the foreign community. Through all these dramatic events—many of which have become inscribed in Japanese historical
legend—Chūemon remained stubbornly optimistic. Yes, the shogunate had promised to close the port; but trade was still flourishing, and new buildings still going up. For the most part, Chūemon took a pragmatic approach based on his direct observation of the situation on the ground. The prosperity was there in front of Chūemon’s eyes, and it was impossible for him to believe that anyone would willingly dismantle such an obvious source of betterment.

  To the extent that Chūemon showed a political consciousness, it was expressed in terms of loyalty to the shogunate and the system that it represented—and faith in its ability to resolve the complex problems besetting it. And yet, even as he remained loyal to the regime that, for him, represented security and privilege, there is also a sense of distance in Chūemon’s letters. When events became particularly dramatic, he had a habit of shrugging his shoulders, so to speak, and leaving matters of high politics to the powers that be: “Since these are orders from on high, there is nothing anyone can do.” Chūemon generally refers to the shogun not with any particular honorifics or expressions of fervor but simply as “the person on high”—ue-sama. When the shogunate demanded obedience of him, he obeyed. When it demanded money, he paid. What choice, after all, did he have? As for the rest, Chūemon tended to focus on the area of his life that he could control: his quest to make money, to build a good life for himself and his family in Yokohama, and to bring prosperity to his business partners in Edo and Kōshū.

  Chūemon’s political consciousness was severely challenged by the overthrow of the shogunate. This epochal event forced Chūemon to examine his very identity. We can certainly see from his letters how Chūemon struggled to define his relationship to the deposed shogun. When the ex-shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, raised a military force for a possible confrontation in Kyoto, Chūemon, unable to continue thinking of him as ue-sama, referred to him instead as the Kantō taikun (lord of the Kantō), delineating him as a regional rather than a national lord. For a while at least, Chūemon appeared to be willing to throw in his lot with the remains of the shogunal regime in its eastern power base, even if that meant the division of Japan into eastern and western kingdoms. For if there was one area of high politics where Chūemon did express a clear opinion, it was in his dislike for and distrust of the western domains, particularly Satsuma. Chūemon was deeply alarmed by the influx of unruly western samurai into Edo and Yokohama after the defeat of the Tokugawa. Nor at first did Chūemon buy the story that the assault on the Tokugawa was the will of the emperor. He consistently referred to the advancing army either as “the western army” (in contrast to the eastern army or the Kantō taikun) or simply as “Satsuma.”

  The western coalition, though, had an ace up its sleeve: its control over the emperor. There is no sense anywhere in Chūemon’s earlier correspondence that he had any feelings of sentiment for or loyalty to this distant and rather mysterious figure. When he wrote of events at the imperial court, he usually referred simply to kamikata—that is, the Kyoto–Osaka area—a term that applied indiscriminately to the emperor, his retainers, and all the samurai agitators who were trying to seize control of events in the ancient capital. As a literate man, Chūemon must have been aware of the rising tide of imperial loyalism, of the school of National Learning and its emphasis on reverence for the imperial institution, and of the increasing pressure for the shogunate to subordinate itself to the imperial throne. But his letters did not address the question of loyalty to the imperial institution until his description of the battle of Toba-Fushimi in early 1868. In that description, he referred to the emergence of an imperial prince on the field of battle as a critical turning point. Although he expressed no personal opinion on the right or wrong of the shogunal army’s refusal to prostrate itself in front of the imperial banners, Chūemon clearly saw the importance of this irrevocable break with the tradition of imperial loyalty.

  Once the emperor assumed absolute authority, Chūemon had to learn all over again how to formulate his relationship with the “powers that be.” He certainly did not resist. Although he was concerned about the influx of western samurai into Yokohama and Edo, Chūemon expressed no dissent against the new regime, nor residual loyalty to the disgraced shogun—who, he simply commented, “has been pardoned and ordered to retire to Mito.” Once the emperor was installed in Edo—now Tokyo—Chūemon learned an entirely new vocabulary of loyalty and even reverence for this newly exalted figure. By the time that the emperor came to Yokohama to open the Tokyo–Yokohama railway line, Chūemon showed in his excitement and his use of reverent honorifics that he was a loyal imperial subject.

  Although his loyalty to and reverence for the emperor were a late development, Chūemon did, during the course of the 1860s, show an increasing sense of national identity. While educated people undoubtedly shared a sense of “Japaneseness,” the nation was only one vector of identity for subjects in the complex political and social networks of Tokugawa-era Japan. For most Japanese the idea of “Japan” was less immediate than domainal and regional identities, which demanded loyalty and tribute, and beyond the boundaries of which most people seldom strayed. In his early years in Yokohama, Chūemon identified himself primarily as a person of Kōshū. The name of his shop was Kōshūya, he described himself as representing the products of Kōshū, he hosted and represented visiting merchants from Kōshū, and when in his letters he referred to his “country” (kuni), he almost always meant Kōshū. His goal was to increase his personal wealth but also to promote the products of his region and to enrich his Kōshū business associates. Yet increasingly during his decade in Yokohama, Chūemon was forced to confront the question of national identity, particularly when Japan’s sovereignty was threatened by the possibility of foreign attack. Chūemon did not even use the word “Japan” (Nippon) in his letters until 1863, but when he did, in the context of a threatened attack on Yokohama, he wrote in strongly nationalistic terms.

  Chūemon’s increasing sense of Japaneseness was surely related to his growing awareness of international contexts. Although generally foreigners remain undifferentiated in his letters as ijin (aliens), Chūemon certainly understood the differences between English and American, French and German. Like the authors of the Yokohama guidebooks, he would have seen an immense diversity of race, culture, and class among the thousands of foreigners in the town, and he would have come to understand the differences between powerful and weak nations, dominant and subservient races. He understood that the French and the Italians were the major consumers of silkworm egg cards. Chūemon himself became both purveyor and to a lesser extent consumer of globally traded goods. And it was in this context of exposure to global flows that Chūemon came to see himself—perhaps for the first time—as “Japanese.”

  Chūemon’s sense of national identity was reinforced by his expanding domestic business, which took him to many of the silk-producing domains of central Japan, as well as to the north in search of opportunities in the mining business. Chūemon’s main product in the late 1860s, silkworm egg cards, was not one of Kōshū’s special products. Rather, Chūemon sourced his supplies through an increasingly far-flung network. Thus, having started out selling and promoting the produce specifically of Kōshū, Chūemon became a supplier of a widely sourced product that was increasingly coming to be identified with Japanese national identity in global markets.

  Indeed, Japan was more and more perceived globally as a national supplier to the world’s silk and tea markets, and even more so to the collectors’ markets for fine lacquer, porcelain, and “curios.” The “made in Japan” brand was not yet a global phenomenon, but it is possible to see its forging in the images of Japan being created in the Japanese and foreign media. During the 1860s, Yokohama was portrayed in word, lithograph, text, woodblock print, performance art, advertising copy, and photograph to both Japanese and foreign audiences. Artists and writers from the beginning recognized that Yokohama meant far more than its small (though rapidly growing) population and trading activities might suggest. For Japanese media, Yo
kohama was often taken to represent the entire international community, a community in which dominant Western nations secured wealth and power through the use of advanced technologies. There was much to criticize in that international community with its uncultured technocracy, imperialist aggression, butchering of animals, evangelizing, and racial and ethnic discrimination. But there was also much to admire: useful new technologies, aggressive and profitable commercialism, comfortable lifestyles, physical health, efficient and fair-dealing institutions, and monarchical and democratic ideologies. Judgment aside, the new understandings of international institutions and international relations represented by descriptions of Yokohama also gave rise to a new awareness of “Japan” and its place in that international system. For shogunal or domainal subjects accustomed to identify primarily with local and regional loyalties, it required an aggressive but glamorous “other” such as that represented by Yokohama to formulate a new awareness and identity as “Japanese.” Certainly there was no universal consensus on what “Japan” meant—or should mean. But the growing ability to articulate globally informed visions of a new national identity undoubtedly influenced initiatives to reshape Japanese political, social, economic, and cultural institutions.

  And although it is tempting to think of the transformative effect of Japan’s exposure to the West as a one-way street, we should not dismiss the impact of Japan on the rest of the world. Just as “Japan” was being created in the minds of Japanese through representations of Yokohama, so in the West, an imagined “Japan” was being created through news reporting, lithographed illustrations, panoramic paintings, souvenirs and curios, photograph albums, and art and craft exhibits. The “Japan” portrayed in these media was often exoticized and eroticized, an orientalist imaginary that in turn fed into political decisions predicated on Japan’s supposed “weak” and “duplicitous” version of oriental despotism.