By the turn of the 1870s, Yokohama had become a center for much more than the textile and tea trades. The new Meiji government pursued an explicit policy of modernization and technology transfer, and Yokohama was the conduit through which a massive flow of information, knowledge, and skills was brought into Japan. Yokohama was the showcase for revolutionary transformations in mass media, financial and corporate institutions, food and drink culture, education, medicine and epidemiology, and transportation and communications.
It was in this last field, transportation and communication networks, that Yokohama had perhaps the most directly transformative impact on the Kantō region and ultimately the emerging modern nation-state. Yokohama was the starting point of Japan’s first stagecoach, steamship, railway, telegraph, and postal services, not to mention the medium that revolutionized local transport throughout nineteenth-century Asia—the hand-pulled rickshaw.
We have seen in Chūemon’s story the powerful business motive to accelerate the flow of information between Yokohama and Kōshū. Chūemon’s on-the-spot knowledge of Yokohama market prices—which were in turn fed by news flowing into Yokohama of global market conditions—was a crucial competitive advantage. Recognizing this, Chūemon did everything he could to convey timely information to his associates in Kōshū so that they could buy or sell before the market moved. At times, he also spread misinformation in order to confuse his competitors in the Kōshū market. Chūemon was also strongly motivated to speed up the transportation of goods, since by doing so he could turn his scarce capital around more quickly. Although Chūemon would certainly have been aware of revolutionary developments in communications and transportation such as railroads, steamships, telegraph networks, and man-made water systems, he did not personally have access to any of these technologies. Instead, he invested more and more heavily in those tools that were available—packhorse and river transport and communication by hikyaku runners—to accelerate the flow of goods and information. But in Chūemon’s experiences, it is possible to see at work a technological imperative that helps explain the rapid introduction of communication and transport technologies into Yokohama in spite of the very high costs, and that ultimately led to revolutionary change in Japan’s domestic transport and communication systems as well as its global connectivity.
The first modern transport system to connect two Japanese cities was the steamship. The Inegawa-maru, an American-built steamer owned by Japanese entrepreneur Itō Jihei, began operating a commercial service between Yokohama and Edo in March 1868. The eighty-foot vessel was powered by a thirty-five-horsepower steam engine, but it also had five masts for wind power to help it on its way. It plied between Eidaibashi in Edo and the Yokohama docks, making the round-trip twice a day. The ship made the eighteen-mile journey in two hours and charged twenty silver monme (about $0.50) for a one-way ticket.86 Early in 1869, a group of fifty-four Edo-based shipping agents grouped together to buy a small, forty-five-foot steamer they called the Hotaru (Firefly). Over the next year, another six steamships began operating the Tokyo–Yokohama route. Two of them were owned by Japanese, the other four by Yokohama-based foreign businessmen. Between them, these ships were able to carry more than one thousand passengers per day between Yokohama and Tokyo. It is unclear how profitable they were given the high cost of buying and operating a steamship, but surviving accounting records indicate that owners expected to recoup their initial investment within two to three years.87 Although most steamships continued to be built overseas and purchased secondhand in Japan, one of them, the Kōmei-maru, was built in Japan’s brand-new Yokosuka Shipyard, just a few miles down the coast from Yokohama. It was staffed by French-trained engineers and pilots, while its crew members were recruited mostly from the local fishing communities.88
The largest of the Yokohama–Tokyo steamships was the City of Yedo, owned by an American consortium headed by G. W. White and with a capacity of one hundred fifty passengers. Tragically, on August 1, 1870, shortly after leaving the Tokyo docks, the City of Yedo’s boiler exploded and the ship instantly sank. Of the 166 passengers on board, 143 were killed or injured. Five of the victims were foreigners, out of 10 foreigners who were riding the ship that morning. The Japanese passengers came from eighteen different regions of Japan, and they included merchants, government officials, and samurai. The great diversity of the passenger list indicates the magnetism of Yokohama for Japanese from throughout Japan.89
Passenger steamship services also began between Yokohama and other destinations in Japan and overseas. The P&O Company launched a regular service from Yokohama to Shanghai with ongoing connections to Europe in 1864. In early 1867, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company began passenger service from Yokohama to San Francisco on the Colorado, carrying up to a thousand passengers on each trip.90 By the early 1870s, there were at least three ships running the Yokohama–San Francisco route (including the America, reputed to be the largest wooden steamer in the world), and there were daily scheduled services connecting Yokohama to Kobe, Nagasaki, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, services from Yokohama to Europe via China also expanded.
By the turn of the 1870s there were also several horse-drawn coach services operating between Yokohama and Tokyo. In the 1860s the narrow road connecting Yokohama to Kanagawa had been unsuitable for heavy vehicles. Although this road was—with foreign tastes in mind—designed for horseback riding, it climbed several steep hills, and it had a number of bridges in the steeply humped “taiko drum” style, making it hard to maneuver a large vehicle. However, in 1869 a new road was laid between Yokohama and Kanagawa, the so-called Bashamichi (Carriageway). The opening of Bashamichi spelled the end of the old ferry service across the bay between Yokohama and Kanagawa, and in the following years, it became the route for coaches, telegraph lines, and the new railway.
William Rangan & Company launched a coach service on the Yokohama–Tokyo route on January 1, 1869—the same day that the Tsukiji district of Tokyo was opened to foreign residence. Rangan’s coaches flew a flag emblazoned with a black horse on a red background. They held up to twelve passengers and were pulled by four horses—though a hostile newspaper report commented that the vehicles were actually “partially covered wagons,” whose owners called them stagecoaches with “humorous disregard of honorable associations.”91 The one-way fare was two dollars—considerably more than the competing steamship services but with a more direct point-to-point service. At around the same time a Japanese firm, Narikomaya, opened a competing service. The firm, which operated a four-horse coach, was jointly owned by Tokyo and Yokohama merchants, the latter including the photographer Shimooka Renjō (who is discussed in chapter 3).92
The Japanese government permitted coach services only on the Tōkaidō route between Yokohama and Tsukiji. Government regulations dictated that when coaches encountered one another they should each pass on the left—inaugurating Japan’s history of left-side driving that continues to this day. And if a coach should encounter a nobleman, regulations required that the passengers should all alight from the coach—an indication that even with the introduction of this new mode of transport, old ways of thinking had not quite died out.93
When the Tokyo–Yokohama railway superseded the stagecoach, the coaching companies responded by expanding services from Yokohama to points west on the Tōkaidō. Sutherland & Co. was already operating between Yokohama and Odawara, with staging posts at Fujisawa and Ōiso, at the end of the 1860s. Sutherland was bought out by Cobb & Co., which added service to Kamakura, Enoshima, Izu, and Hakone. In 1875, it added a line to the silk-trading center of Hachiōji.94 Sutherland also operated a mail service, and it was notable for developing the first Japanese postage stamp: a perforated pink or yellow stamp depicting a galloping horse whose rider is blowing a horn. It came in denominations of a quarter bu and one bu and was printed “SUTHERLAND & Co. Postage 1 Boo.”95
Also at the end of the 1860s, the jinrikisha (rickshaw) began appearing on the streets of Yokohama. Its
origins are still unclear, although Jonathan Goble, an American Baptist missionary and adventurer, claimed to have invented it.96 The first documentary evidence of the rickshaw’s existence is from April 24, 1870, when three residents of Tokyo—Izumi Yōsuke, Suzuki Tokujirō, and Takayama Kōsuke—applied for a license to manufacture and sell the vehicles. An advertisement published by Suzuki illustrates a lady sitting at her ease in a rickshaw while being pulled along the road. A Tokyo government ruling in November 1870 gave Suzuki and his associates the sole right to manufacture the vehicles, but already many look-alikes were springing up, and it is clear that Suzuki et al. were unable to hold on to their monopoly. It has been estimated that by 1872, more than ten thousand rickshaws were plying the streets of Tokyo. In fact, the diary of the Sekiguchi family in Namamugi village outside Yokohama indicates that by the early 1870s, some of the farmers in the village were borrowing money from the Sekiguchis and building their own rickshaws to put into service on the Tōkaidō.97 Yokohama is estimated to have had several hundred rickshaws in service by this time, and in 1871 the Kanagawa government began imposing an annual tax on rickshaws in service. In 1874, Tokyo government statistics show the manufacture of fifty eight hundred rickshaws in that year alone. The rickshaw spread like wildfire throughout Japan (and indeed throughout all Asia, where it remained a primary means of urban transportation until the mid-twentieth century), and by 1875, the number of rickshaws nationwide was already estimated at one hundred ten thousand. The cost of a vehicle in 1871 was around fourteen ryō.98 Surprisingly, Chūemon does not once mention the rickshaw in his letters.
The rickshaw also entered the competition in transportation services between Yokohama and Tokyo. A Tokyo-based transport agent by the name of Genshichi launched a rickshaw service in June 1870. Genshichi’s rickshaws were four-seaters, pulled by two runners selected from his large staff of barrow pullers and porters. Competing services quickly sprang up on this route, and when Gunma silk trader Tajima Yahei visited Yokohama in 1871, he commented that “the Tōkaidō was crowded with rickshaws going in both directions.”99
The rapid spread of competing transport services on the Edo/Tokyo–Yokohama route illustrates the enormous importance this route had for the Kantō economy. Indeed, no other route in Japan compares in the speed of introduction of new transportation technologies. This may have been due in part to the presence of well-capitalized foreigners (as well as Japanese entrepreneurs) looking for new sources of profit. But investors were motivated primarily by the high volume of travel between the two cities. It is no coincidence that Japan’s first railway was also on this route.
Eighteen years earlier, in 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry had presented the Japanese government with a miniature train and engine, together with a working telegraph system (the telegraph machine is still on display in the Communications Museum in Tokyo). Although Perry’s intention was to show the Japanese the potential benefits of a policy of openness, it took almost twenty years for the promise of the railway to be realized. The problem was the enormous cost. The first plan for a Yokohama–Edo line was submitted as early as March 1867 by one of the British residents in Yokohama but quickly rejected by the government on financial grounds. Then, in January 1868—just days before the collapse of the shogunal government—a shogunal minister signed a contract with an American consortium for the construction of a railway over a three-year period. But when the new government took over, in spite of its pledge to honor the previous government’s commitments, it rejected the railway contract on the grounds that the completed line would be foreign owned. In February 1869 six Japanese merchants, residents of Yokohama, submitted their own proposal, which emphasized patriotic considerations. Their proposal was vague, however, when it came to the question of financing.100
In December 1869, the government approved a proposal by an English businessman, N. H. Lay. Lay committed to provide financing, materials, and technical personnel for the project. The contract called for Lay himself to advance the money for the project and for payments on the loan to come from import and export taxes, as well as a percentage of the railway’s revenues. The Japanese government would both own and manage the railway. The Lay proposal foundered, however, over the question of financing. Lay succeeded in floating a loan on the London exchange for one million pounds, at an interest rate of 9 percent. The Japanese government had promised to pay Lay an interest rate of 12 percent, and when it learned of the large profit he would make on the interest, it exercised its sovereign privilege and withdrew from the contract. In the end the government sent its own representative to London to negotiate a loan at 9 percent. The entire process therefore remained in the hands of the Japanese government. Nevertheless, most of the equipment, and all the key personnel, were brought to Japan from England, so the project in the end was both financed and built by the British.101
Construction of the eighteen-mile track began in April 1870, and for two years the construction project dominated the landscape between Yokohama and Tokyo. The complex project involved detailed surveying, the purchase of land along the route, the reclamation of coastal land to extend the line along the seashore, the grading of cuttings and embankments, the importation and construction of track, and the construction of twenty-two bridges, most notably a massive iron bridge across the Tama River.
After two years of intense effort, the trains began running on June 12, 1872. The Yokohama terminus was at what is now Sakuragichō Station, close to the center of the town. On the Tokyo end, the original line went only as far as Shinagawa, on the outskirts of Tokyo; it took another four months to extend the line to Shinbashi, just a stone’s throw from the Imperial Palace in the center of Tokyo. The train took thirty-five minutes to complete the eighteen-mile route. The completed line included four intermediate stations (Kanagawa, Tsurumi, Kawasaki, and Shinagawa), forty-two railway sheds and other buildings, four engine-turning stations, four dams, ten steam engines, fifty-eight passenger cars, and seventy-eight freight cars. At the time of its completion, the railway was employing forty-four foreign specialists, including engine drivers, masons, carpenters, and clerks (this number was actually to rise to one hundred three by 1876, before dropping steeply under a new government policy of replacing foreign employees with trained Japanese specialists).102
In spite of his initial enthusiasm for the magnificent new transportation route, eight months after the opening ceremony Chūemon commented, “Very few people are riding the train.”103 The statistics prove him wrong. In its first three months, the Yokohama–Tokyo line had almost half a million passengers, and in the following full year (1873) the number increased to 1.4 million, or an average of almost 4,000 a day on its nine scheduled departures each way (average 220 people per train). The popularity of the railway, even at the relatively high prices charged, offered a strong confirmation of the importance of the Tokyo–Yokohama route, which by this time had become the single most-traveled route in Japan.104
The turn of the 1870s also saw a revolution in communications and media, starting with an explosion in newspaper publishing and extending to the laying of a national telegraph system and the inauguration of a national postal system. Once again, Yokohama was the nursery for these new services.
Three English-language newspapers opened in Yokohama during the 1860s: the Japan Times, founded in 1862; the Japan Herald, 1865; and the Japan Gazette, which was the first daily newspaper, in 1867.105 The first Japanese-language newspaper was the Kaigai shinbun (Overseas news), founded in 1865 by Joseph Heco (see chapter 3 for more on Heco). Heco saw his newspaper as a way to inform his countrymen about overseas affairs. The material in the newspaper was translated from foreign newspapers, which arrived with each ship that docked in Yokohama.
A second Japanese-language newspaper, the Bankoku shinbun (News of many countries), was started in 1867 by an English priest, M. Buckworth Bailey. Like the Kaigai shinbun it contained summaries of foreign news, arranged country by country. Also like the Kaigai shinbun, it was published on woodbl
ocks specially carved for each issue. Unfortunately, in spite of his good intentions, the Reverend Bailey was deeply unpopular in Yokohama. Shortly after founding the newspaper, he was forced out of his position at Christ Church, and he went home to England, leaving a relieved board of church trustees to report, “We have built a new aisle, bought an organ, and sent Mr. Bailey home. Future generations of residents should contribute their share of these expenses since they would enjoy the benefits!”106 The newspaper, however, was forced to close.
Since these journals appeared irregularly and did not contain Japanese news or commentary, they may not qualify as true newspapers. But they clearly showed the possibilities for a regular published source of news for a wide reading public. Meanwhile the English-language newspapers, which contained local and foreign news and analysis, sometimes combative commentary including at times criticism of both the foreign and Japanese authorities, and trade reports, shipping news, advertising, and other practical items, were a model that many Japanese looked to as they considered launching their own newspapers.
Both the shogunate and the new Meiji government were intensely conscious of the utility of newspapers and of the value of controlling the news and opinions they expressed. In its final years the shogunal government sponsored several newspapers coming out of the Yōsho Shirabeshō (Center for the Investigation of Foreign Books). For the most part, like their Yokohama counterparts, they were translations of foreign news sheets. However, starting in 1870 a new and influential newspaper, the Yokohama shinbun, began publication in Yokohama. This was much more in the style of a foreign newspaper, with a mixture of advertising, news, and commentary.107
By the early 1870s, newspapers had become integrated into the fabric of Japanese urban life. During the 1860s, Chūemon mentioned several times that he was enclosing a copy of a letter describing some important event. Chūemon was generally well informed about major events taking place in Japan, including the turmoil in Kyoto in the mid-1860s, the actions of the restive provinces of Chōshū and Satsuma, and the doings of major daimyo whose actions might impact the Yokohama trade. He did not always indicate where he obtained this information, but we can assume it was a mixture of word of mouth from travelers along the major highways, printed broadsheets, and circulating letters, which would be copied and recopied as they made their way around the literate circles of Japan.
The Merchant's Tale Page 24