The Door Ajar: Japan's Foreign Trade in the Seventeenth Century.

Abstract

Historians generally assume that Iemitsu, the third shogun, prohibited overseas travel by Japanese in 1635 and expelled the Portuguese in 1639 to secure the Tokugawa polity from the disruptive influences of foreign commerce and religion. This study of Japan's foreign trade shows, to the contrary, that the events of the 1630s did not isolate Japan from the world economy and that continued trade was consistent with Tokugawa interests. Far from fearing foreign trade, Tokugawa Ieyasu promoted its expansion and diversification to strengthen his political and military position. Under Hidetada and Iemitsu, his son and gr and son, the regulation of trade for political reasons received increasing emphasis, but as statistics presented in the dissertation indicate, trade remained as substantial in the last half of the seventeenth century as in the first half. The ban on overseas travel was intended less to shield Japan from outside influences than to eliminate the privilege of participation in or supervision over external commerce granted to a few individuals by Ieyasu. Only when these residual rights were destroyed would Iemitsu's own authority over foreign trade be absolute. The fates of Japanese shipowners, the Portuguese, and the Dutch were all related to Iemitsu's maneuvers to place foreign trade under the control of officials responsible to himself. Later in the century Tokugawa trade policy was remarkable not so much for the attention paid to the requirements of the shogunate as for the concern devoted to the needs of people whose livelihoods depended on foreign commerce. Beyond refuting the significance of the 1630s as a turning point, the dissertation treats the 185 years from the 1530s to 1715 as a single, coherent period. The era's defining characteristic is the exchange of Japanese silver for Chinese silk. The Macao-Nagasaki trade of the Portuguese and the channelling of Sino-Japanese commerce through Korea, the Ryukyus, and Southeast Asia are variants of this basic pattern necessitated by Chinese restrictions on trade with Japan. The epoch ended in 1715, when bullionism and a belief in the virtue of self-sufficiency, which both began to gain popularity in the 1660s, combined with the need to preserve the nation's gold and silver for the minting of new coins to inspire effective trade restrictions. During the 1600s foreign trade's economic impact was concentrated in the mining and silk weaving industries, which are both analyzed in detail in the dissertation. Trade abetted the development of mining through the introduction of foreign technology and through exports, which increased the dem and for silver, gold, and copper. Metal exports paid for the imported silk yarn used on the looms of Kyoto's silk weaving industry. Most trade-related activities were located in western Japan. Regional analysis of trade-related activity shows that foreign trade provided an economic stimulus in the west to offset purchasing power lost to Edo because of the sankin-kotai system and Tokugawa monetary policy. Contrary to the usual assumption that trade threatened the stability of the shogunate, the Tokugawa-controlled cities of Nagasaki, Kyoto, Osaka, and Sakai were the principal beneficiaries of overseas commerce. However, the import substitution policies adopted in t and em with the 1715 trade restrictions encouraged the growth of rural industry and the cultivation of new crops such as sugar cane. Rural industries gradually undermined the economic dominance of the Tokugawa cities, and sugar cane provided Satsuma, a future foe of the Tokugawa, with a valuable financial resource. Economic isolation, rather than foreign trade, presented the greater menace to Tokugawa rule.