The problem of monetary inflation was compounded by a series of poor harvests, notably in 1866. For most Japanese people, the price of food was the most important determinant of well-being. While prices overall climbed steadily through the first half of the 1860s, the rice shortages of the mid-1860s caused dramatic food-price increases and accompanying hardship. Mark Metzler has pointed out that the inflation of the 1860s and the food shortages of 1866–1867 also reflected global trends. The entire global trading system experienced steep commodity inflation in the middle years of the decade, exacerbated by severe weather events and culminating in a serious financial panic—a combination that prompted one British journal to call 1866 a year “of almost uniform disaster.”136 As a result of their new connections to global markets in silk, cotton, and tea, Japanese farmers and small-scale merchants were now vulnerable to events taking place thousands of miles away.
According to Francis Hall, in 1860 the typical unskilled laborer in Yokohama made roughly 400 copper mon ($0.08) per day. A skilled artisan might make as much 800 mon.137 In 1860, 100 mon would buy 4.3 gō of rice (about 3.25 cups), or enough to feed an adult for a day. But by 1866, 100 mon would only buy 0.83 gō (only a little more than 1 cup)—only a fraction of the amount needed to support a working adult. For a family of four, 400 mon might have been enough for survival in 1860. By 1866, it meant starvation.138
Clearly, the inflation also fed antiforeign sentiment. Indeed, critics directly linked the foreign trade to the suffering of villagers throughout Japan. Some of the activists who murdered Japanese merchants in retribution for dealing with foreigners justified their actions by referring to the price increases and shortages resulting from the large-scale export of “the staples of the land”: “We can no longer remain blind to the sufferings of the people.”139 In December 1861, when it transpired that foreign merchants had been evading the restriction on the export of staple foods by buying up flour (which was not explicitly covered in the treaties), Kanagawa commissioner Hori Toshihiro committed suicide in expiation.140
However, for the artisans and laborers of Kōshū, the political and social instability caused by the antiforeign campaigners compounded the hardship and misery. The political upheavals of the 1860s forced villagers to provide labor and defense services as well as financial contributions to the struggling shogunal government. Among other demands, Kōshū villagers were required to help manage the enormous increase in traffic on Japan’s highways as aristocrats and feudal lords with their armed retainers moved about the country in response to political developments; they were forced to provide labor and defense services to ward off repeated threats; and they had to pay numerous extra taxes to help finance the shogunate’s military campaigns. Meanwhile, the breakdown of law and order within the province added to the stress and insecurity of daily life.141
On June 10, 1865, Chūemon stood and watched as a vast procession of warriors and foot soldiers passed through the post stations of Hodogaya and Kanagawa. The shogun himself was leading an army west to subdue the recalcitrant domain of Chōshū. “From Yokohama, the officers ordered two hundred men to be sent to assist. I and five other local leaders went and supervised. Around twenty thousand men are passing through today and tomorrow, all day without ceasing. Altogether who knows exactly how many tens of thousands there are?… The amount requisitioned in Edo for this is said to be around two million ryō [$5.5 million]. I understand they are expecting requisitions in Kōshū, too.”142
The enormously expensive expedition was to end in defeat and humiliation for the shogunate, ushering in a period of momentous political change culminating in the collapse of the two-hundred-fifty-year-old Tokugawa regime. In the meantime, the costs of the expedition were indeed borne by merchants, artisans, and farmers throughout the shogunal domains, including Kōshū. In the city of Kōfu, the merchant community was called on to provide almost 6,000 ryō ($16,400) for the campaign, allocated based on wealth. Altogether 1,400 or more people had to contribute, all the way down to humble shopkeepers. In the countryside, Hayashi village, a poor mountain hamlet with 27 households, was required to contribute 70 ryō ($191). Its normal annual tax was only 45 ryō ($122). The two wealthiest families paid 17 and 13 ryō, respectively, 4 families paid 5 ryō, 2 paid 3 ryō, while 8 families could pay only a quarter of a ryō ($0.70).143
The financial distress fractured the social bonds and security infrastructure that had kept Kōshū safe throughout the Tokugawa era. Wealthier families were forced to respond with handouts and loans. In 1864, when Kōfu’s wealthiest merchants donated several hundred bales of rice in order to alleviate distress (and also to deflect anger away from themselves), almost five thousand people—about 40 percent of the entire population—lined up to receive food handouts. In 1867 in Nakahagiwara village a group of poor villagers staged a sit-in at the house of Heijiemon, a member of the village elite, asking him to lend them rice. In response, the wealthy villagers of Nakahagiwara donated a total of forty-one bales of grain to more than fifty needy villagers—five bales were donated personally by Heijiemon. The following month, the better-off villagers raised 108 ryō ($295) in cash to distribute to almost eighty needy villagers, in the form of gifts and loans. Similar dramas played out in villages across the region and indeed throughout Japan.144 While silk merchants in the regions surrounding Yokohama prospered from the booming demand for silk thread and other products, the established textile industries of Kyoto and the Kansai region went into decline, their raw materials increasingly unaffordable and their finished product unable to compete with high-quality imports.145
Meanwhile, Edo itself was falling into a deeper and deeper slump. With the abandonment in 1862 of the alternate-attendance system that had required daimyo to maintain large households in Edo, a massive exodus of domainal samurai caused Edo’s population to decline by almost one-quarter. The loss of more than half the city’s samurai elite caused a severe depression—exacerbated by the price inflation of major commodities—among the merchants and artisans who had catered to them. The departure of the shogun and a large army of retainers in 1865 further hollowed out the city. For much of the rest of the decade, the shogun Iemochi and his successor, Yoshinobu, spent as much or more time in the Kyoto area as in Edo (Iemochi died in Osaka in August 1866). Meanwhile, Edo suffered from a progressive breakdown in law and order, starting with the depredations of antiforeign rōnin and culminating in the surrender of the city to antishogunal forces in July 1868. While it would be wrong to attribute Edo’s decline entirely to the opening of Yokohama, there is a remarkable contrast between the steep decline in the fortunes of Edo and the rapid growth and prosperity of Yokohama. At least a part of this disparity was caused by the shogunate’s forlorn commitment to close the treaty port and its consequent inability to share in the prosperity created by growing international trade.
The middle years of the 1860s were a time of great opportunity but also of great challenge and hardship for many. The very factor that created new possibilities for wealth and prosperity—the enormous demand for export products in the new treaty ports—was also deeply destabilizing for Japan’s economy and political system. Shinohara Chūemon made his fortune in the midst of dramatic upheavals, including the threat of war between Japan and the Western powers; the very real possibility of the massacre of both Japanese and Western merchants in Yokohama; samurai unrest and widespread acts of terror, many of them targeting merchants like Chūemon; the fracturing of the two-hundred-fifty-year old “Pax Tokugawa” and the threat of civil war; and severe economic distress among large sections of the population.
At the center of many of these events was the rapidly growing city of Yokohama, the outlet that connected Japan to the global network of markets and commerce. While some blamed Yokohama and its foreign residents for the ills that were afflicting Japan, for many the wealth and prosperity of this city were a siren call, luring them from all parts of Japan and the world to share in the opportunities created by its rapid growth. A huge outpouring o
f printed materials and other media created alluring images of this exotic place, where strange customs, beautiful women, exciting new technologies, and new economic opportunities could all be enjoyed.
The processes of economic, cultural, technical, and human exchange that took place in Yokohama were also influential in creating new understandings of the world and of Japan’s place in it. For many Japanese, this meant casting aside long-established preconceptions and prejudices and reconceiving the meanings of lifestyle, class, race, civilization, and indeed of “Japan” itself. In the West, too, a new “Japan” was being created through print media, photography, souvenirs, exhibitions, arts and crafts collections, and performances—many of them mediated by the commercial marketplace of Yokohama. The images of Japan were both crafted and commodified—exotic, erotic, and looking back to Japan’s ancient traditions—but also exquisite, original, exhibiting extraordinary artistic and physical prowess and looking forward to Japan’s new role as a rapidly modernizing society taking its place in the community of nations.
The middle years of the decade brought great prosperity for Chūemon. They also brought about a shift in his perception of his spatial and political identity. He started his sojourn in Yokohama as a subject of the shogun and a representative of his “country,” Kōshū. But by the mid-1860s his business activities extended well beyond the boundaries of Kōshū as he adjusted to a new frame of reference that was both national and international. And while he remained loyal to the shogunate and no doubt abhorred the idea of revolution, it is also possible to see him reevaluating his identity and coming to understand what it might mean to be “Japanese.” It would not be long indeed before Chūemon was called on to cast aside his old loyalties and take on a new identity as citizen and subject of a unified Japan and its new symbol, the emperor.
4 TRANSFORMATION (1866–1873)
BRANCHING OUT
Toward the end of 1866 Chūemon turned his attention to an ambitious project he had first mentioned two years earlier. In mid-1864, Chūemon had talked of raising ten thousand ryō and going to Ōshū (in northeastern Japan, now Fukushima prefecture) to investigate business possibilities there.1 In October 1866, with business at home in a lull, Chūemon set off on the mountainous, one-hundred-forty-mile journey to distant Nanbu domain in the southern part of Ōshū. He left Naotarō in Yokohama and Shōjirō in Kōshū to take care of the business.
Chūemon’s trip to northern Japan reflects his widening outlook and his developing national scope. Although he started out trading in Kōshū’s agricultural produce, Chūemon’s experiences in Yokohama brought him into contact with a much wider sphere of enterprise. Many of the major domains had offices in Yokohama, sometimes using their domainal privilege to bypass shogunal trade restrictions. Back in 1864, Chūemon hinted at a connection with Nanbu when he mentioned a plan to sell four thousand cases of Nanbu silk in Yokohama (at a time when silk shipments were at a standstill because of government restrictions), from which “it may be possible to profit.”2 Now, Chūemon’s access to large amounts of capital opened up new avenues of opportunity. Kōshū was no longer big enough to satisfy his ambition.
Nanbu was a major producer of silk and silkworm egg cards, but on this trip it was not silk but quartz that interested Chūemon. Quartz crystal was a product of the Kōshū mountains, and there was a developing industry in Kōfu making decorative items such as netsuke (belt ornaments), inro (containers for personal belongings), and sculptures for display in wealthy homes, as well as more practical items such as lenses for spectacles. Mount Kinpusen, on the border between Kōshū and Shinshū, was known to contain huge lodes of quartz, but the shogunate prohibited commercial mining, and the only available supplies were derived from small quantities dug up by farmers in the region.3 Once before, in June 1865, Chūemon had asked his son to buy quartz in Kōshū and send it to Yokohama. Now, Chūemon had heard that the lord of Nanbu domain was open to relaxing the restrictions on mining in his territory. Quartz was not a significant export product—at no point in the 1860s is it listed in the top-ten export items—but the growing wealth of the Yokohama market must have persuaded Chūemon that there was opportunity in this luxury product.4 In October 1866 he set off on the long road north, leaving his son at home to manage the business.
With Chūemon gone, Naotarō did his best to keep things going in Yokohama. There was little business in silk, but Naotarō asked his brother Shōjirō to buy up silk cocoon waste—“Don’t worry too much about the quality—if you can get it for less than three hundred mon [$0.06] per kan [8 lbs.], any quality will do.”5 Naotarō also got quite excited about the possibilities for selling goji berries in the Yokohama market. On November 13 he wrote, “I want you to buy these very secretly … Please go around vey urgently, and buy. If they are raw … please have them semidried, in boxes, and send them to me. I can sell top-quality dried berries for twenty to thirty dollars for sixteen kan [130 lbs.]. Unlike other products, these items are not abundant, so please do not talk to anyone about this … If you handle it badly, the price will go up. If anyone asks, tell them that you are buying them as gifts for children.”6
In the midst of these scenes of peaceful enterprise, on November 26, Yokohama was struck by disaster. A fire broke out in the kitchen of a restaurant near the Miyozaki licensed quarter. There was a strong wind that day, and the fire spread more rapidly than anyone imagined possible. Within an hour, it had leveled almost half the town and killed dozens.
John Black, an eyewitness to the fire, wrote how it spread through the foreign settlement:
The new American Consulate was now literally level with the ground, and reports flew around, that No. 1, the residence, offices, and godowns of Messrs. Jardine, Matheson & Co., had caught. In another few seconds it reached the whole settlement that the private residence of No. 2, Messrs. Walsh, Hall & Co., was on fire. Simultaneously with this, the whole range of the old Consular buildings—the French, Prussian, American and English, in which latter several gentlemen of the English Legation and Consulate were residing—were swept off like so much tinder. The wind increased almost to a typhoon: the sparks communicated with the old Japanese Custom house, and in almost as short a time as it takes to pen this tale of desolation, it was a thing of the past.
Black also described the total destruction of the brothel quarter: “With the exception of one or two fire-proof godowns, and the temple at the end, not a single stick was standing to mark the boundaries of dwellings. Unhappily, here was a terrible loss of life, no less than thirty five dead bodies having been found.”7 Black added that the British soldiers who were brought in to help fight the fire looted the houses they were supposed to be saving and quickly became “utterly and helplessly drunk.”8
Ernest Satow described watching the fleeing prostitutes struggle to escape across the single bridge that spanned the moat surrounding the brothel quarter. “There were one or two boats available, but they were already overcrowded, and their occupants were so paralysed by fear that they never thought of landing and sending back the boats to take off others. I saw a few poor wretches plunge into the water in order to escape, but they failed to reach the nearer bank.”9 The foreign observers were unable in their commentaries and letters to write directly about what must surely have been weighing heaviest on their hearts: that most of the victims of the fire were women who had been virtually enslaved in the walled and moated town of Miyozaki for the purpose of serving the foreigners’ own sexual desires.
By a miracle, the fire stopped just short of Chūemon’s neighborhood, and his house and storage buildings were untouched. But, wrote Naotarō, “I will have to pay thirty ryō in consolation money, so I share in the loss. It is terrible for us all.”10
In the midst of the desolation of the ruined town, Naotarō struggled to keep the family enterprise going. Chūemon had told them he would return by December 21, 1866 (Keiō 2/11/15), but no word came from him. With the end of the year approaching, Naotarō had to send gifts to the family a
nd manage the year-end finances without his father’s help. He needed to send money to Shōjirō for the year-end payment of their Kōshū debts, but once again “this year-end will be extremely difficult.”11
Chūemon finally returned on January 27, 1867. In spite of the devastation he found on his return, he was euphoric. He recounted his adventures in a long letter to Shōjirō. “On the twenty-ninth [of the ninth month, November 6, 1866] I arrived at a place called Kōriyama, in the Nanbu domain of Ōshū. I traveled by horse.” Chūemon requested permission to visit the quartz mines, and he was sent to a mountain called Wayama, sixty miles from Kōriyama.
I identified one place here to investigate, and I spent 10 ryō digging a shaft 5 ken [30 feet] deep into the rocks. I brought about 800 me [7 lbs.] of different kinds of earth to the mine head, as well as 2 bales of fine powder. In order to assess the quality, I brought along Mr. Godakegane from Kōshū, as well as Jūsuke from Koseki village, and Yamahigashiya Shinpei from Yamagakechō in Kōriyama. We all worked fervently in pursuit of success regardless of the snow. We concluded that from this mountain we can make 5,000 ryō or possibly 10,000 ryō. I was told I should take a close look at Minami Shōzan and one other place next year, after the snow has melted. According to the private analysis of a member of the daimyo’s family, that mountain has quartz, silver, and gold. Ever since the beginning of Japan, that mountain has been known as Treasure Mountain, and no one has been allowed to go there. However, in my case I was invited to a banquet, where the chief minister gave me written permission …
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