The Merchant's Tale

by Simon Partner

    22.   Letter 111, Bunkyū 3/10/5 (11/15/1863), to Shōjirō.

    23.   Letter 112, Bunkyū 3/10/12 (11/22/1863), to Shōjirō.

    24.   Letter 113, Bunkyū 3/10/26 (12/6/1863), to Shōjirō.

    25.   Ibid.

    26.   Letter 89, Bunkyū 2/8/22 (9/15/1862), to Ihei and two others. Unfortunately the other letter has not survived.

    27.   Letter 108, Bunkyū 3/8/10 (9/22/1863), to Shōjirō.

    28.   Letter 124, date unknown, to Shōjirō. For an analysis of delivery times in the collection, see Yabuuchi Yoshihiko, Nihon yūbin sōgyō shi: Hikyaku kara yūbin e (Tokyo: Yūzankaku Shuppan, 1975), 73.

    29.   May 3, 1860, in Francis Hall, Japan Through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama, 1859–1866 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 161.

    30.   Letter 108, Bunkyū 3/8/10 (9/22/1863), to Shōjirō.

    31.   Letter 113, Bunkyū 3/10/26 (12/6/1863), to Shōjirō.

    32.   Letter 118, Bunkyū 3/11/29 (1/8/1864), to Shimura Jizaemon, Yamashita Goroemon, and village representatives.

    33.   Fukuzawa Tetsuzō, “Kinsei kōki no kinai ni okeru gōnō kinyū no tenkai to chiiki,” in Kinai no gōnō keiei to chiiki shakai, ed. Takashi Watanabe (Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2008), 250. There are many similar accounts of widespread local and regional lending. See, for example, Nakayama Tomihiro, “Kinsei kōki ni okeru kashitsuke shihon no sonzai keitai: Bingo Fuchū Nobuto-ke no jirei,” Shigaku kenkyū 172 (1986): 1–20.

    34.   See Edward E. Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gōnō (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999).

    35.   Fukuzawa, “Kinsei kōki,” 261.

    36.   Letter 119, Bunkyū 3/12/3 (1/12/1864), to Yamashita Goroemon, Komazawa Buzaemon, and Shōjirō.

    37.   Letter 136, Genji 1/9/4 (10/4/1864), Shōjirō to Chūemon.

    38.   Letter 141, Genji 1/9/23 (10/23/1864), Chūemon and Naotarō to Shōjirō.

    39.   Letter 148, Genji 1/10/27 (11/26/1864), to Shōjirō. See also McMaster, Jardines in Japan, 114–15.

    40.   Letter 137-1, Genji 1/9/7 (10/7/1864), Naotarō to Ochiai Sataro.

    41.   Letter 140, Genji 1/9/23 (10/23/1864), to Shōjirō.

    42.   Letter 155, Keiō 1/2/9 (3/6/1865), to Komazawa Buzaemon and Shōjirō.

    43.   Letter 156, Keiō 1/2/21 (3/18/1865), Naotarō to Shōjirō.

    44.   Wikipedia, s.v. “Pébrine,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pébrine.

    45.   Letter 159, Keiō 1/4/17 (5/11/1865), to Shōjirō.

    46.   For an overview of treaty negotiations with France and other countries and of the growing Japanese-French alliance that facilitated the trade liberalization, see Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), chapters 4 and 5.

    47.   Hiroshi Hasebe, “Silkworm Egg Trading and the Village in Early Modern Japan,” in Village Communities, States, and Traders: Essays in Honour of Chatthip Nartsupha, ed. Akira Nozaki and Chris Baker (Bangkok: Thai-Japanese Seminar and Sangsan Publishing, 2003), 285–86.

    48.   Letter 162, Keiō 1/5/19 (6/12/1865), Chūemon and Naotarō to Shōjirō.

    49.   Letter 167, Keiō 1/6/21 (8/12/1865), to Yamagata Rin’emon, Yamashita Goroemon, Hanjirō, and Shōjirō.

    50.   Akira Shimizu, “Eating Edo, Sensing Japan: Food Branding and Market Culture in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1780–1868” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011). One of Shimizu’s case studies is of Kōshū grapes, a brand that has retained its cachet right down to the present day.

    51.   Letter 176, Keiō 1/8/13 (10/2/1865), to Shōjirō.

    52.   M. Paske-Smith, Western Barbarians in Japan and Formosa in Tokugawa Days, 1603–1868 (Kobe: Thompson, 1930), 303. Ishii Kanji has conducted a more exhaustive study of the available statistics; see Ishii, Kōto Yokohama no tanjō, 125–86. I have used a summary that takes both these studies into account: Yokohama Zeikan, Yokohama Zeikan hyakunijū-nenshi (Yokohama: Yokohama Zeikan, 1981), 24.

    53.   John Black, Young Japan, 1:55.

    54.   February 10, 1862, in Hall, Japan Through American Eyes, 398.

    55.   Philip Billingsley, “Bakunin in Yokohama: The Dawning of the Pacific Era,” International History Review 20, no. 3 (1998): 550–55.

    56.   Shin’ichi Miyazawa, “Ernest Satow’s Japan Diary, 1862–1863: An Annotated Transcript,” Saitama Joshi Tanki Daigaku kenkyū kiyō, no. 10 (1999): 322.

    57.   An excellent account of a multigenerational family history in Yokohama is Leslie Helm, Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan (Seattle: Chin Music Press, 2013).

    58.   Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan, ed., Yokohama mono no hajime kō (Yokohama: Yokohama Kaikō Shiryō Fukyū Kyōkai, 1988), 144.

    59.   Ibid.

    60.   Ibid., 146–47.

    61.   Ibid., 148–49.

    62.   Ibid.

    63.   Ibid., 158.

    64.   Roger Mottini, “The Swiss–Japanese Treaty of Friendship and Commerce of February 6, 1864” (speech given at the city hall of Zurich, February 6, 2004), http://www.mottini.eu/articles/2004_Swiss-Japanese-Treaty.pdf.

    65.   Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan, Yokohama mono, 160.

    66.   Gonda Masumi, “Bakumatsuki kara Meiji shoki no Yokohama kaikōjo ni okeru Eigo no gakushū,” Kōwan keizai kenkyū: Nihon kōwan keizai nenpō 50 (2013): 139–48. For Momotarō, see also Haru Matsukata Reischauer, Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986).

    67.   Wikipedia, s.v. “Kishida Ginkō,” https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B2%B8%E7%94%B0%E5%90%9F%E9%A6%99.

    68.   A. Hamish Ion, American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan, 1859–73 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 58–60.

    69.   John Clark, “Charles Wirgman,” in Britain and Japan, 1859–1991: Themes and Personalities, ed. Hugh Cortazzi and Gordon Daniels (London: Routledge, 1991), 55.

    70.   Ernest Mason Satow, A Diplomat in Japan: The Inner History of the Critical Years in the Evolution of Japan When the Ports Were Opened and the Monarchy Restored (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1921), 211.

    71.   Clark, “Charles Wirgman,” 62.

    72.   Wikipedia, s.v. “Felice Beato,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_Beato.

    73.   Anne Lacoste, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 13.

    74.   Illustrated London News, September 26, 1863; quoted ibid.

    75.   Mio Wakita, “Sites of ‘Disconnectedness’: The Port City of Yokohama, Souvenir Photography, and Its Audience,” Transcultural Studies 2 (February 2013): 85.

    76.   Kikuen Rōjin, Yokohama kidan: Minato no hana (Kinkōdō Zō, ca. 1864), 20.

    77.   December 9, 1859, in Hall, Japan Through American Eyes, 85.

    78.   April 15, 1861, ibid., 326. American impresario Hezekiah Bateman was famous for putting four of his children on the stage.

    79.   Quoted in Frederik L. Schodt, Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe: How an American Acrobat Introduced Circus to Japan—and Japan to the West (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2012), 134.

    80.   Aya Mihara refers to a series of performances by members of the Hamaikari and Matsui families that took place as early as Augus
t 1864 (“Professional Entertainers Abroad and Theatrical Portraits in Hand,” Old Photography Study, no. 3 [2009]: 53).

    81.   Schodt, Professor Risley, 46–47.

    82.   Quoted ibid., 126.

    83.   Hiroko Johnson, “Yokohama-e: Prints of a New Port City,” in Dreams and Diversions: Essays on Japanese Woodblock Prints from the San Diego Museum of Art, ed. Andreas Marks and Sonya Rhie Quintanilla (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2010), 148.

    84.   Kikuen, Yokohama kidan, 5–6.

    85.   Ibid., 1–2.

    86.   Johnson, “Yokohama-e,” 160.

    87.   Translated and quoted in Todd Munson, “Curiosities of the Five Nations: Nansōan Shōhaku’s Yokohama Tales,” Japan Studies Review 12 (2008): 24. See also Nansōan Shōhaku, Chinji gokakoku Yokohama hanashi (Yokohama, ca. 1862).

    88.   Kikuen, Yokohama kidan, 5–6.

    89.   Ibid., 22.

    90.   Ibid., 8–9.

    91.   Ibid., 19.

    92.   Ibid., 25–27.

    93.   Ibid., 10–13.

    94.   Ibid.

    95.   Ibid., 20.

    96.   Ibid., 22.

    97.   Ibid., 20.

    98.   Ibid.

    99.   Utagawa Sadahide, Yokohama kaikō kenbunshi biyō, ed. Kida Jun’ichirō (Tokyo: Meichō Kankōkai, 1967), 4.

  100.   Ibid., 2.

  101.   Ibid., 20.

  102.   Kikuen, Yokohama kidan, 27–28. For an extended discussion of Tokugawa-era views on race, see Gary P. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–1900 (London: Continuum, 2003), 83–99, 136–37.

  103.   Letter 164, Keiō 1/5/29 (6/22/1865), to Shōjirō; letter 186, Keiō 1/11/7 (12/24/1865), Naotarō to Shōjirō; letter 187, Keiō 1/11/9 (12/26/1865), Naotarō to Shōjirō; letter 215-1, Keiō 3/2/13 (3/18/1867), Chūemon and Naotarō to Shōjirō.

  104.   Letter 180, 1/8/28 (10/17/1865), Chūemon and Naotarō to Shōjirō.

  105.   Kären Wigen, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

  106.   Hiroshi Mitani, “A Protonation-State and Its ‘Unforgettable Other’: The Prerequisites for Meiji International Relations,” in New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, ed. Helen Hardacre and Adam L. Kern (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

  107.   Pat Barr, The Coming of the Barbarians: The Opening of Japan to the West, 1853–1870 (New York: Dutton, 1967), 78.

  108.   “Life in Japan,” August 10, 1861; see Terry Bennett, Hugh Cortazzi, and James Hoare, Japan and the “Illustrated London News”: Complete Record of Reported Events, 1853–1899 (Folkestone, Kent, U.K.: Global Oriental, 2006), 76.

  109.   Alan Hockley has suggested that many of the standard images of Japan portrayed in text and image actually predated the opening of the ports, reaffirming stereotypes created by earlier writers who relied mostly on Dutch accounts, some of which were centuries old (“Expectation and Authenticity in Meiji Tourist Photography,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, ed. Ellen P. Conant, 114–32 [Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2006]).

  110.   Lacoste, Felice Beato, 16–17.

  111.   Luke Gartlan, “Samuel Cocking and the Rise of Japanese Photography,” History of Photography 33, no. 2 (2009): 159.

  112.   On japonisme, see Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West (London: Phaidon, 2005). See also Yuko Kikuchi and Toshio Watanabe, “The British Discovery of Japanese Art,” in The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations 1600–2000, Volume 5: Social and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Gordon Daniels and Chushichi Tsuzuki, 146–70 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Mio Wakita discusses the agency of Kusakabe Kinbei in “Sites of ‘Disconnectedness.’ ” I am most grateful to Mio Wakita for her valuable insights into these cross-cultural exchanges.

  113.   London Times, May 12, 1862, 12.

  114.   Illustrated London News, May 24, 1862; see Bennett, Cortazzi, and Hoare, Japan and the “Illustrated London News,” 97.

  115.   Illustrated London News, May 30, 1862, ibid., 100.

  116.   “Japanese Manufactures at the Great Exhibition,” The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal 36, no. 7 (October 18, 1862): 54.

  117.   Quoted ibid., 54.

  118.   [Gustave] Duchesne de Bellecour, “L’état politique et commercial de la Chine et du Japon: L’exposition chinoise et japonaise au Champ de Mars,” Revue des deux mondes, August 1, 1867, 733.

  119.   Mihara, “Professional Entertainers,” 49.

  120.   Ibid., 52.

  121.   Quoted in Schodt, Professor Risley, 194.

  122.   For an excellent narrative of Risley’s life, the Imperial Japanese Troupe, and its performances worldwide, see ibid.

  123.   M. William Steele, “The Village Elite in the Restoration Drama,” in Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 36–38.

  124.   Letter 153, Genji 1/month unknown/15 (1864), to Shōjirō.

  125.   Yamanashi-ken, Yamanashi kenshi: Tsūshi hen (Kōfu: Yamanashi Nichinichi Shinbunsha, 2004), 4:816.

  126.   Letter 151, Genji 1/12/9 (1/6/1865), to Kino Chūkichi.

  127.   Letter 180, Keiō 1/8/28 (10/17/1865), Chūemon and Naotarō to Shōjirō; letter 182, Keiō 1/10/4 (11/21/1865), to Shōjirō.

  128.   Letter 233, Keiō 3/7/3 (8/2/1867), Chūemon to Shōjirō.

  129.   Letter 199-1, Keiō 2/6/17 (7/28/1866), to Shōjirō.

  130.   Ibid.

  131.   Yamanashi-ken, Yamanashi kenshi, 799.

  132.   Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

  133.   Yamanashi-ken, Yamanashi kenshi, 799–800.

  134.   Yukihiko Motoyama, Proliferating Talent: Essays on Politics, Thought, and Education in the Meiji Era, ed. J. S. A. Elisonas and Richard Rubinger (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1997), 22–23.

  135.   Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1970), 37–38. See also Simon James Bytheway and Martha Chaiklin, “Reconsidering the Yokohama ‘Gold Rush’ of 1859,” Journal of World History 27, no. 2 (2016): 281–301. I am most grateful to Sergey Tolstoguzov (Hiroshima University) for his valuable help with the tricky topic of Edo-era currency. Dr. Tolstoguzov maintains that the third factor, government overproduction of coinage, was by far the most significant inflationary factor.

  136.   Mark Metzler, “Japan and the Global Conjuncture in the Summer of 1866” (paper presented at the Heidelberg History Conference on “Global History and the Meiji Restoration,” Heidelberg, July 3–5, 2015), 24.

  137.   August 21, 1860 and May 21, 1861, in Hall, Japan Through American Eyes, 213, 339.

  138.   Takeo Ono, Edo bukka jiten (Tokyo: Tenbōsha, 1991).

  139.   Heco and Murdoch, Narrative of a Japanese, 14.

  140.   Ibid., 264–65. Wikipedia puts his death a year earlier and attributes it to his mishandling of the treaty negotiations with Prussia; Wikipedia, s.v. “Hori Toshihiro,” https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A0%80%E5%88%A9%E7%85%95.

  141.   Yamanashi-ken, Yamanashi kenshi, 810.

  142.   Letter 162, Keiō 1/5/19 (6/12/1865), Chūemon and Naotarō to Shōjirō.

  143.   Yamanashi-ken, Yamanashi kenshi, 820.

  144.   Ibid., 828.

  145.   Toshihiro Atsumi, “Silk, Regional Rivalry, and the Impact of the Port Openings in Nineteenth Century Japan,” Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 2
4, no. 4 (December 2010): 519–39.

  4.   Transformation (1866–1873)

      1.   Letter 134, Genji 1/7/29 (7/17/1864), to Shōjirō, in Ishii Takashi, ed., Yokohama urikomishō Kōshūya monjo (Yokohama: Yūrindō, 1984). Please note that all cited letters relating to Chūemon are collected in the Ishii volume.

      2.   Letter 132, Genji 1/6/14 (7/17/1864), to Shōjirō.

      3.   Yamanashi Jewelry Association History, “History,” http://yja.or.jp/history/.

      4.   Letter 164, Keiō 1/5/29 (6/22/1865), to Shōjirō. For tables of export items, see Ishii Takashi, Kōto Yokohama no tanjō (Yokohama: Yūrindō, 1976), 87–147.

      5.   Letter 209, Keiō 2/12/6 (1/11/1867), Naotarō to Shōjirō.

      6.   Letter 205, Keiō 2/10/7 (11/13/1866), Naotarō to Shōjirō.

      7.   John Reddie Black, Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1880), 2:17–24.

      8.   Ibid.

      9.   Quoted in Par Barr, The Coming of the Barbarians: The Opening of Japan to the West, 1853–1870 (New York: Dutton, 1967), 186.

    10.   Letter 207, Keiō 2/11/4 (12/10/1866), Naotarō to Shōjirō.

    11.   Letter 209, Keiō 2/12/6 (1/11/1867), Naotarō to Shōjirō.

    12.   Letter 211, Keiō 2/12/23 (1/28/1867), to Shōjirō.

    13.   Ibid.

    14.   Letter 219, Keiō 3/4/2 (5/5/1867), to Shōjirō.

    15.   Letter 221, Keiō 3/5/3 (6/5/1867), to Shōjirō.

    16.   Letter 223, Keiō 3/5/13 (6/15/1867), to Shōjirō.

    17.   Letter 225, Keiō 3/5/19 (6/21/1867), to Shōjirō and Naotarō.

    18.   Letter 227-1, Keiō 3/5/25 (6/27/1867), to Shōjirō and Naotarō.

    19.   Letter 228-1, Keiō 3/6/6 (7/7/1867), Naotarō to Shōjirō.

    20.   Letter 223, Keiō 3/5/13 (6/15/1867), to Shōjirō; letter 259, Meiji 1/4/13 (5/5/1868), to Shōjirō.

    21.   Letter 234, Keiō 3/7/12 (8/11/1867), Naotarō to Shōjirō.

    22.   Letter 230, Keiō 3/6/25 (7/26/1867), Chūemon and Naotarō to Shōjirō.