Contemporary writers and subsequent historians have tended to blame the foreigners for this disruptive drain on the Japanese gold supply. It has been described as “a scandalous speculation … leaving many blots on the foreign name”; as an example of “bad faith” aimed at “illicit” gain; as “unscrupulous”; as creating “an amount of indignation and bitterness on the part of the Japanese as it will take years to allay”; and as “[draining] their treasury of native currency by false representations.”92 Indeed, like the opium trade in China, one could see it as typifying the exploitative and asymmetrical relations of trade under the East Asian treaty port system. There is a scholarly debate as to how obsessed the foreign merchants actually were with the gold and how detrimental the trade really was to the shogunal government or the Japanese economy.93 But from the comments of early visitors to Yokohama it is clear that the gold trade was a huge lure to foreign merchants and adventurers, and that many did in fact make quick fortunes. At the same time, the upheavals in currency values that resulted from the foreign “gold rush” undoubtedly contributed to the destabilization of the Japanese financial system and ultimately brought hardship to millions of poor Japanese (discussed further in chapter 3).
John Brooke, an American naval captain who was stuck in Yokohama for several months after his first lieutenant ran their ship aground, witnessed the scramble for gold firsthand. In November, Brooke commented that “gold is abundant and there is a steady stream of it setting from the country … The Japanese government must be aware of the fact that gold is largely exported and I presume steps will soon be taken to check it.”94 Brooke declared himself “heartily tired of Yokohama. There is too much traffic, too much talking of cobans [koban].”95
Brooke’s lieutenant—the same man who had grounded their ship and caused them to be marooned in Yokohama—did his very best to profit from their sojourn. As government officers, both Brooke and his lieutenant were given privileged access to Japanese silver coins. Brooke commented that “the Authorities allow so many [one-bu coins] for each person requiring the exchange. Lieut. Thorburn has been using my name by permission. I have often told him that I do not wish to change money, but he persistently requests it nearly every day.”96 In January, when their house was burned down in a fire, Thorburn confided to Brooke that he had been able to save his cash hoard of nine thousand dollars. Brooke commented rather sourly, “He has been fortunate then since his arrival here, for he was then in debt.”97
Large-scale merchants like Jardine, Matheson were also trying to get their hands on gold coins, although their first preference was probably still to buy silk and other products.98 On November 16, 1859, William Keswick asked his Shanghai office for two hundred fifty thousand dollars for the purchase of gold and silk. When he saw an opportunity to buy gold before these funds arrived, he was quite prepared to borrow at a 16 per cent rate in order to secure “a few hundred pieces.”99 On December 3, he wrote that “during the last two or three days I have not so much as seen even one Cobang. I very much fear from this … that the Authorities are really in possession of sufficient power to almost suppress the trade.”100 But a few days later, he was able to send onboard a Jardine ship a total of nine boxes of koban coins, under the accounts of six different Yokohama-based merchants. The total value was about thirty-five thousand dollars, and it appears that Jardine’s was acting as exchange broker on their behalf.101
The American merchant Francis Hall reported meeting “a German Jew who will furnish one with kobangs.”102 The next day, Hall “obtained 50 kobangs of the Jew” before visiting a Japanese shop, in which “the old gentleman cautiously opened a drawer and brought out some kobangs. These I did not buy as he asked too much.”103 A few days later, Hall noted that “two or three shops have been closed by the authorities … for dealing in kobangs.” And the following week Hall wrote that “all natives crossing the bridges into Yokohama are searched for kobangs.”104 Yet in spite of these threats and restrictions, on December 22, 1859, Hall was able to send his agent in Canton “120 kobangs and 75 quarters ditto.”105
Cees de Coningh recalled in his memoir that since his house was in an isolated place, he was often visited by Japanese smugglers, who would illegally bring gold coins and gold dust into Yokohama. On one occasion, he was visited by a gang of three smugglers, men “with the most rascally faces I have ever seen”106 They sold him a huge pile of gold dust that they had secreted about their bodies for four hundred bu ($200). De Coningh should have been alerted by the low price. When he had the “gold” sent to Shanghai for assay, he learned that it was in fact antimony, worth only $0.15 per pound.107
Although Chūemon was not directly affected by the Yokohama gold rush, the stagnation in trade caused by the unavailability to foreign merchants of Japanese currency—as well as their preference for using all the currency they could obtain to buy gold—surely reduced his prospects for doing business with them. However, in spite of these obstacles, Chūemon remained optimistic through the end of 1859. In addition to his abortive sale to Barber, surviving documents indicate at least five other sales of silk to foreigners during the second half of 1859.108 And although Chūemon faced the New Year away from his family and unable to pay his debts, he continued to believe in the near-limitless potential of the Yokohama market.
The treaty port of Yokohama was created from conflict. A reluctant shogunal government accepted trade relations with the United States, Great Britain, and several other Western countries because it believed it had no other choice. The background to this reluctant embrace was an aggressive age of Western (including Russian) imperialism in Asia, fueled by technological development and the rapid opening of new routes to the Pacific. The subjection of large parts of Asia to European rule, and the humiliation of China in the two Opium Wars, were sobering reminders of Japan’s precarious position.
But if the shogunal government was forced to accede to the main goal of the Western nations—trade conducted under the protection of extraterritorial privilege—it was successful in asserting a measure of control over the process. Under the guidance of Chief Minister Ii Naosuke, a group of senior administrators created a new town “out of thin air,” a town that was expressly planned to manage and control Japan’s relationship with its new foreign residents. Unlike many of the Chinese treaty ports, which were governed as colonial enclaves by powerful councils of foreign residents, Yokohama remained for the most part under the direct control of the shogunal administration. The planning, layout, construction, and day-to-day management of the town all remained in the hands of the Kanagawa commissioners. The plan they developed was designed to isolate the foreigners in a guarded location as far as possible from the mainstream of Japanese commercial and social activity. Japanese, foreigners, and the workers and prostitutes who served them—each group was allotted its own space, separated from the others and, wherever possible, closely supervised and controlled by the government. Key to the success of the project was the attractiveness of the town that the commissioners had created. Complete with grand government buildings, extensive commercial facilities, an excellent port, and lavish entertainment facilities, Yokohama was designed to be a place where both Japanese and foreigners would want to live.
In spite of the success of many of these measures, Yokohama was from the beginning a lightning rod of conflict, both for the Western powers that occupied its foreign settlement and for domestic agitators determined to reverse the shogunate’s humiliating submission to foreign demands. Indeed, the conflict over the treaties and their implementation laid bare fissures in the Japanese sociopolitical structure that were only to deepen in the decade that followed—that called into question, indeed, the very notion of “Japan” as a unitary state.
Yet even in the painful circumstances of its birth, Yokohama was understood by many to be a place of extraordinary opportunity. Its foreign residents scrambled to take advantage of new trading opportunities and to profit from the unintended consequences of ill-thought-out policies related t
o currency and foreign exchange. In spite of the reluctance of many, and even the coercion employed to bring them in the first place, Japanese merchants, laborers, entrepreneurs, and tourists soon flocked to the town in response to the opportunities it offered for wealth and pleasure.
Among those who responded to the call of Yokohama was Shinohara Chūemon, a fifty-year-old man with no experience of foreigners or foreign trade, with limited financial resources, and without the status or privilege of the elite merchant houses of Edo. In order to move to Yokohama he left behind a comfortable life of local privilege, a position as political leader of his village, and a rich network of family and friends in exchange for an uncertain future as a small-scale merchant in a town that did not yet exist. What impulse was strong enough to uproot him from his comfortable place in the sun and pull him to this new space of radical uncertainty? A part of the answer lies in the enigma of individual personality—we can never truly understand human motivation. What we can discern, though, are Chūemon’s deep commitment to the well-developed commercial and human networks of the regional elite of Kōshū whom he aspired to represent; his sense of belonging within the shogunal system that linked Yokohama and Kōshū; and the powerful lure of personal gain.
2 YEARS OF STRUGGLE (1860–1864)
NEIGHBORS
The city was brilliant with ornament and spectacles … The whole population were in holiday dresses … as if a thousand rainbows had been shattered into four or five foot fragments and gone stalking about in curious pose, the robes of every imaginable hue.1
It was July 18, 1860, and the entire community of Yokohama had come together to enjoy an extravagant festival. Sitting on the mat of a Japanese shopkeeper, surrounded by smiling faces and plied with tea and snacks, Francis Hall watched as a procession of a dozen floats passed by, pulled by pairs of bullocks. Each float represented one of the neighborhoods of the Japanese town. Spellbound, Hall tried to interpret the twenty-five-foot-high individual tableaux atop each cart: a pine grove with waterfall, tiger and dragon; a colorful goddess “with long hair flowing down her neck and a gorgeous dress of brocade silks and gold silken tissues”; a man tossing his head and arms about “to represent a fox with a grotesque fox head adorned with a long beard”; and a “Nippon demi-god bearing aloft over his head an immense bell.” Most intriguing to Hall was a “representation of the train of a daimio passing through the streets of Yedo [Edo]. The norimon [palanquin] was preceded by pike and standard bearers, armor bearers, weapon bearers who wound along with a peculiar slow and mock dignified step, for this scene was evidently a half caricature. The norimon instead of a Prince had another fox riding within who sat in dignified state. On each side of the norimon walked three men clad in female attire, their faces painted and colored like so many harlequins.”
Indeed, bizarre scenes abounded: townsmen dressed as warriors with wooden swords and fan-bearing servants; “two, four, or more girls dressed as policemen and bearing in their hands the iron staff and rings of that office”; courtesans of the brothel quarter dressed in gorgeous finery, perched on the floats and acting out “a variety of plays, pantomimes, and dances”; and two men carrying penises “of colossal proportions” on their backs. As night fell, “the spectator was bewildered with the glare of light, the glittering of colors, the miming cars, the showy females in the house show, many graceful dances; it was a scene conjured up by a wizard’s spell. All night long the revel lasted, there was no sleep.” Hall found it “the gayest scene of popular festivity that it had ever been my lot to witness.”
The Benten festival was a first-anniversary celebration for the town. The authorities, anxious to show off Yokohama’s newfound prosperity and future potential (and also to impress their foreign guests), planned it on a grand scale. The festival was nominally a religious event, in honor of Benzaiten, the Buddhist-Shinto-Hindu syncretic deity of the Benten shrine (and, conveniently for the new town, one of the shichifukujin, or “seven deities of wealth”). In practice it was a lavish street party, raucous, brilliantly colored, and well lubricated with sake, which was “only less free than water.”2 The cost was said to be in excess of twenty thousand ryō ($40,000 in Mexican dollars), of which eighteen hundred ryō was donated by the shogun himself.3
Chūemon, his wife, and three of his sons were there. Naotarō had finally got his wish and moved to Yokohama to help his father in the shop. The younger boys, Seitarō and Katsusuke, had come to be with their mother. Happy to be reunited, the family was full of optimism about the future. For Chūemon and Naotarō, the festival symbolized the hope and glamour they attached to Yokohama. They had been building up excitement about the event for weeks, urging their family members and friends from Kōshū to join them and watch from Chūemon’s storefront, in a prime position on Honchō-dōri and near one of the town’s biggest intersections. Their street was brilliantly decorated, hung with brightly colored paper lanterns, the shop fronts covered in decorative paper and ornaments.
This was Chūemon’s neighborhood, his home now. And as a proprietor of one of the first businesses to open, he had a respectable position as a leading member of the community. Chūemon and Naotarō could not watch the festival with their family because they had been deputed as parade marshals. Both were required to wear formal clothes—pleated hakama trousers and kimono with the family crest.4 Since they did not own any such clothing, they had to have it specially made up.5 That was not their only expense. A few days after the festival, Chūemon was presented with a bill for thirty-five ryō ($70) for his share of the festival costs. This was no small sum: as we will see, Chūemon was struggling to find even a few ryō in loans to invest in his fledgling business.
The entertainment was a splendid celebration of Yokohama’s arrival on the national and global stage. Already the town was growing extraordinarily quickly, a magnet for merchants, adventurers, opportunists, transients, and migrants from all parts of the world. In Japan and abroad, Yokohama was coming to be known as a place where fortunes could be made, where the constraints of class and privilege could be thrown off, and anyone, if they were lucky, and clever, and hardworking enough, could make it big; a place where “one can see apprentices and coolies freely walking around the streets carrying large amounts of foreign silver.”6
Chūemon was a core member of this community. The people in his immediate circle were the proprietors of the shops of Nichōme. Although they were all business owners, they were a diverse group. Chūemon himself was struggling to get his modest business on a firm footing. Right across the street from Chūemon was the Echigoya, the Yokohama branch of the Mitsuis, Japan’s wealthiest merchant family. The grand two-story textile emporium and foreign-exchange broker had been built at an expense of almost four thousand ryō—twenty times Chūemon’s own investment—with a wood-floored area with chairs for foreign buyers and a separate tatami-floored sales area for Japanese buyers.7 The owner of the shop was Mitsui Hachirōemon, a distant and legendary figure who conducted his business from the family headquarters in Kyoto, sending runners up and down the two-hundred-fifty-mile highway (they made the journey in four days) to keep him informed. Chūemon was friends with Senjirō, the Echigoya’s Yokohama branch manager.8 At the other extreme was the Shibaya store two blocks down from Chūemon, which had been opened by a trio of villagers from nearby Shibau village, led by Tezuka Seigorō. Seigorō and his associates had built their eighteen-hundred-square-foot store at a cost of only thirty ryō.
The merchants of Nichōme were bound by the administrative system of the Edo shogunate, a system of which British diplomat Laurence Oliphant declared “the great principle … is the absolute extinction of individual freedom.” The system worked by “a complicated machinery, so nicely balanced, that, as everybody watches everybody, so no individual can escape paying the penalty to society of any injury he may attempt to inflict upon it.”9 Certainly, this was a system in which every resident was assigned duties and obligations, with a high degree of oversight. The Kanagawa commission
ers placed the headmen of Hodogaya and Yokohama villages in overall charge of the town’s administration. Under them, at the head of every neighborhood was a machi-nanushi, or “neighborhood headman.” The nanushi conducted their day-to-day business in the chōkaisho (town hall), a building in the administrative center of the town next to the customs house and under the supervision of the Kanagawa commissioners. The nanushis’ responsibilities included communicating and enforcing the laws enacted by the commissioners; keeping an up-to-date register of all residents and their family members; ensuring that fire prevention and firefighting measures were in place; registering and approving financial and property transactions; rooting out bad elements in the neighborhood; mediating disputes; organizing the neighborhood’s participation in festivals; and administering neighborhood funds.10
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