However, by the end of the 1860s, Chūemon was clearly supplementing his information sources with newspapers. In June 1868, he enclosed a newspaper with his letter and asked Shōjirō to give it to one of their business partners.108 Chūemon had been faithfully reporting commodity prices by letter for years, but now Chūemon wrote, “The rest of the market conditions you can see in the newspapers.”109 The spread of newspapers was both a boon and a threat to Yokohama-based merchants like Chūemon. On the one hand, the newspapers provided comprehensive and up-to-date information on domestic and foreign events, market conditions, and shipping movements. This information was certainly useful to merchants in both the cities and the provinces. But on the other hand, the availability of reliable and regularly printed information greatly reduced the information advantage of Yokohama-based merchants. The market information that they might previously have gleaned from talking to foreign merchant houses and then rapidly communicated to their provincial associates in order to take advantage of price differentials was now readily available to anyone with access to a newspaper.
By the early 1870s, Chūemon was also using Japan’s new national postal service, one of the first branches of which was in Yokohama (the Yokohama Post Office opened on August 30, 1871). The Japanese postal service was the brainchild of Maejima Hisoka, a young samurai who had spent a year in England studying the workings of the British system. There was a particular incentive to introduce a post office in Yokohama, because several of the foreign nations already operated their own offices in the town, for international mail only and using their own systems of postage stamps. These offices served both as examples and as something of a goad to the Japanese government.
Until the opening of the postal service, Chūemon and other merchants like him used the services of private courier firms, hikyaku. The largest of these had national networks and offered sophisticated services, including the issue of bills of exchange and the discounting of notes. They sent mail and other items through a network of runners, who would operate in relays to cover the major highways of Japan in remarkably short times. These services met many of the needs of the merchants, and Chūemon was a loyal user of one in particular, the Kyōya, based in Edo but with branches in Kōshū.110
However, the hikyaku lacked many of the amenities of a modern postal service, and they could be extremely expensive—as much as three ryō for a single delivery in one case recounted by Chūemon. Maejima recalled in his memoirs a conversation he had with the head of the league of hikyaku firms, who had come to protest against the threat to the hikyaku business when the new postal service opened. The representative “said that for more than two hundred and fifty years the communications of our country had been excellent … Although one would expect the government to prize this, on the contrary, its attempt to seize this business for itself was the acme of wickedness.” Maejima, however, argued that no Japanese hikyaku could offer a truly national service, including to remote areas like northern Hokkaido—let alone an international service. “I explained that communications were of the utmost importance in international trade and in the life of a society, and that throughout the world, an enlightened country had to construct a system for communications within the country and abroad. Gradually I made him understand that the house-based operations of his association, with their message delivery limited to one region or one country, could not accomplish this great purpose.”111
However, the Japanese postal service employed many of the existing hikyaku firms, subcontracting at first and later hiring the couriers away from their former employers. The early service was quite limited: much as the hikyaku services before it, the postal service could deliver only to the post stations along the major highways, and for onward delivery the sender had to continue to rely on private services. But the system quickly expanded, and in April 1873, the Japanese post office instituted a system of standard delivery fees to any address nationwide: one sen ($0.01) within the city of origin and two sen for anywhere else in the country. This was a drastic reduction from the hikyaku fees and could be achieved only with the financial resources of the government behind it.112
Although Chūemon did not mention the opening of the post office, he did use the service. At least two of the five surviving letters sent in 1873 can be verified as having gone through the new postal system.
Yokohama was also a hub of Japan’s rapidly developing telegraph system. While telegraph connections are much cheaper and less demanding in terms of infrastructure than railways, they nevertheless required access to advanced technology and a large amount of investment capital. They were, however, a priority for the new government, which recognized their strategic and military potential. Japan’s first public telegraph line opened between Edo/Tokyo and Yokohama in December 1869. The baby steps of the Japanese system came at a momentous time in the maturation of the global telegraph network. After the development of undersea cable, massive projects were initiated to connect the world’s continents. In 1866 the Atlantic telegraph connected Great Britain and Europe with the United States and Canada. In 1870, an undersea line connected India to Britain, and shortly afterward the line was extended to Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the Russian government completed an overland telegraph route across Siberia to Vladivostok. It was only a matter of time before the telegraph reached Japan, and indeed in 1871 the undersea cable was brought to Nagasaki, connecting Japan with Asia, Europe, and the United States. The spread of international cable was actually happening faster than the development of domestic telegraph lines: at the time of the opening of the undersea cable, Nagasaki was still not connected to Yokohama and Tokyo. Foreign merchant houses in Yokohama had to rely on steamship services to bring news on the last leg from Nagasaki. Nevertheless, by the end of 1871, information that a decade earlier would have taken three months to reach Yokohama from London or New York now arrived within ten days or less. In 1873 the overland telegraph route from Tokyo and Yokohama to Nagasaki was finally completed, allowing same-day communication between Yokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the capitals of the Western world.113
There is no record of Chūemon using the telegraph service. Public telegraphic connections to Kōshū (which had become Yamanashi prefecture) did not open until 1879, by which time Chūemon’s business career was over.114 There is no doubt that if he had still been in business, Chūemon would have leaped at the chance to speed up his communications with his son and business associates in Kōshū and beyond. His impulse to transmit important news and instructions as quickly as possible is evident throughout his business career in Yokohama. But would he have benefited from the telegraph? Chūemon’s competitive advantage in the 1860s came in part from his privileged access to information about the Yokohama market and his ability to convey that information quickly and secretly to his associates in Kōshū, enabling them to take advantage of pricing disparities between the two markets. The advent of the newspaper with its regular market reports was already chipping away at that advantage by the end of the 1860s. With the arrival of the telegraph, access to market information was instantly available to anyone with a Yokohama correspondent. Chūemon’s competitive advantage would have quickly evaporated. He benefited, in fact, from a short-term window of opportunity, and the very success of his activities, and those of others like him, helped stimulate the drive to introduce new technologies that accelerated communications and transportation while drastically reducing the privileged access to information.
By the turn of the 1870s, it was also apparent that Yokohama was at the center of an emerging revolution in Japanese lifestyles. Not only new modes of transportation but also new habits of clothing, food, housing, and hygiene were taking root in the Tokyo-Yokohama area and spreading into the hinterland.
As early as June 4, 1860, Francis Hall wrote, “My servant Iwasaki came into my room this morning … to display his new clothes cut after the Chinese fashion with close sleeves … I suspect if the people were left to themselves they would readil
y imitate foreigners in many customs. Sadajirō, who has been wearing a shirt for several days, is an object of great curiosity whenever he appears in the Tōkaidō. He says he is envied more than laughed at.”115
John Black reports that beginning in the mid-1860s,
gradually a custom began to show itself, of native gentlemen having one room in their houses, furnished after a foreign fashion, with a handsome square carpet or rug in the centre of the room—over their own nice mats; a table covered with a gag cloth and chairs surrounding it, in the middle of the carpet; glass windows in at least one of the sliding sashes; and, sometimes, pictures and mirrors hanging on the sides of the room. Many began to eat meat and declare that they liked it; and all would drink champagne to any extent; thus giving the best proof of their approbation. As yet none dared appear openly in foreign costume. Any who did so would certainly have been roughly handled. But it was not long before they adopted them without fear.116
The transformation of clothing was not only a matter of fashion. Manufactured cloth was one of the major imports into Yokohama, and its rapid spread transformed both the economics and the aesthetics of clothing. Yamakawa Kikue, a woman from the samurai class in the Mito domain (now Ibaraki prefecture), recalled how “the popularity of obi made of imported grogram [a cloth made of mixed silk and wool] spread like wildfire … Once the country was forced open, new goods appeared with an increasing rush, just as water, having breached a dike, floods in with ever greater force. Imported cotton yarn … first made an appearance about this time. Thanks to this, within a few years, both the constant sound of the spinning wheel in Mito households and the cotton fields along the banks of the Naka River had disappeared.”
Yamakawa recalls the reaction of the townspeople of Mito when the largest retailer began stocking merino wool (known locally as Chinese crepe, though actually manufactured in Europe): “That smooth, soft feel, different from either silk or cotton; once one had worn it nothing else would do. People began to use Chinese crepe for obi, for the cords for fastening the kimono around the waist, for the sleeves of underrobes.”117
Clothing was one of the many areas connected to the body that the Japanese authorities attempted to regulate in order to make their subjects more “civilized.” John Black reported that beginning in 1867, all coolies in Yokohama were required to wear clothes. As the government directive stated, “Those who come from divers places to Yokohama and make their living as porters, carters, laborers, coolies and boatmen, are in the habit, especially in the summer, of plying their calling in a state bordering on nudity. This is very reprehensible; and in future no one who does not wear a shirt or tunic, properly closed by a girdle, will be allowed to remain in Yokohama. The Coolie-masters are to give liberal assistance for the suppression of such people.”118
In 1871, the Kanagawa government supplemented these regulations with new laws against public urination. From now on, this offense would be punishable as a crime. For those with urgent need, the municipality also introduced Yokohama’s first public toilets in 1871.119
Food culture also came under new influences, as Yokohama and the other treaty ports developed into laboratories of new lifestyles. Privileged Japanese could sample Western food at the tables of foreigners, who invited them to banquets and receptions. By 1868, there were sixteen foreign hotels and clubs in Yokohama, and it was not unknown for them to entertain Japanese guests. In 1866, the English cartoonist Charles Wirgman drew a picture of a young Japanese in the United Service Club, a cigar in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. The top part of his body is dressed in Japanese style, but his sword is tucked into a pair of Western-style trousers. Under the caption “Young Japan at the U.S. Club (a fact),” the Japanese is saying, “I like only civilization.” Wirgman’s model is said to have been Hayashi Tadasu, a student at Mrs. Hepburn’s school and already polished in Western manners, who would go on to be foreign minister in the Meiji government.120 Ernest Satow, a young British diplomat in Yokohama in the 1860s, recalls in his autobiography how samurai would often visit him from Edo to discuss his views of the world, and “the two-sworded men were always happy to get a glass of wine or liqueur and a foreign cigar, and they were fond of discussion. They would sit for hours if the subject interested them.”121
Meanwhile, the lower classes could sample Western food and drink at the many cheap drinking houses that opened along the waterfront as well as on the edge of the swamp area behind the foreign settlement. The American businessman Raphael Schoyer owned several of the waterfront properties where “grog shops” had sprung up, and one resident complained that “[on his property near the pier] is a row of Japanese-style one-story houses. In those houses, men of all nationalities are operating drinking establishments, and on Sundays and holidays there is an indescribable noise and confusion.” According to a Prussian survey, Schoyer was renting to five Portuguese, four French, two English, two Americans, and one Dutchman. These bars were places where Europeans and Japanese, blacks and whites, servants and sailors could mix indiscriminately in the shared enjoyment of cheap liquor.122
Imported liquor was brought into Japan in large quantities, and although much of it was expensive by Japanese standards, by the turn of the 1870s it was being sold by Japanese as well as foreign retailers. The Japan Brewing Company (forerunner of Kirin Beer) began producing domestically made beer in Yokohama in 1869. In 1871 Japanese residents could buy a bottle of beer in the Fujimichō section of Yokohama for three shu three hundred mon (about $0.25). Railway engineer Kawahara Eikichi went out drinking with his friends in 1873 and drank his fill for about one yen, which was the price of twenty pounds of rice at the time.123 There was also an increasing interest among the Japanese in the consumption of meat, and by the turn of the 1870s there were a number of restaurants in Yokohama that served the Japanese community with Western-style meat dishes.
For the most part, the Japanese government allowed food culture to develop as it would. But one issue, the question of meat eating, became embroiled in issues of national identity and national development. Many Japanese who were educated in Western medicine came to believe that the Japanese were physically smaller and more subject to disease than Westerners because of the lack of meat in their diet and that meat eating should be encouraged as a matter of national policy. To that end, in 1872 the emperor publicly announced that his household ate meat and that he himself greatly enjoyed beef and mutton. Some questioned whether it was appropriate for the emperor to eat beef when Japan’s native religion, of which he was considered by many to be the high priest, abhorred any contact with death. But the emperor’s handlers responded that in ancient times Japan had in fact been a vigorous meat-eating culture, and it was only with the advent of Buddhism (which was now being denigrated as an effete foreign cult) that meat eating had been proscribed.124
However, Sugimoto Etsu recalled that when her father brought home some beef after a doctor had told him it would make his family stronger, young Etsu found her grandmother and a maid “sitting before the black-and-gold cabinet of the family shrine. They had a large lacquer tray with rolls of white paper on it and the maid was pasting paper over the gilded doors of the shrine.” When Etsu asked why, her grandmother replied, “The ox flesh is to be brought into the house in another hour and our duty is to protect the holy shrine from pollution.”125
As a founder-resident of Yokohama, Chūemon was undoubtedly aware of many of these trends. Although neither he nor Naotarō commented in surviving letters on their own use of foreign clothing, food, or drink (and the one surviving photograph of them, taken in 1872, shows them in strictly Japanese attire), they do show an awareness of the business opportunities such new products might bring. Naotarō in particular was eager to experiment. Between 1865 and 1867 he tried shipping imported cotton thread, dyestuffs, stoves, and liquor to Kōshū.126 None of these products seem to have caught on: after their first mention, they all disappear from the letters. However, as we will see, in the early 1870s Naotarō began regularl
y sending imported sugar to his brother in Kōshū, while Chūemon opened a shop specializing in the tailoring of Western clothes. Given this level of involvement, it is hard to believe that Chūemon—and more particularly Naotarō, who had spent the whole of his adult life in Yokohama—would not also have been influenced in their personal lifestyles by the new trends. Indeed, one striking feature of a family photograph of 1872 is that Naotarō is prominently holding up to the camera an imported pocket watch.
The surviving letters of another Yokohama merchant family, the Yoshidas from Gunma, do indicate a number of Western influences in the family’s daily life. In November 1871, the head of the family sent home to Gunma a package of beef preserved in miso, telling his family that this was his granddaughter’s favorite food in Yokohama. And in January 1872, he wrote that since his daughter-in-law was not producing enough milk to feed her baby, he was trying to persuade her to use cow’s milk instead. At around the same time he writes of the spread of Western-style haircuts and comments that his own granddaughter now sported a Western hairstyle.127
In September 1871 the Meiji government passed a law encouraging (though not requiring) Japanese men to grow out their hair, abandoning the shaved crown and oiled topknot that had been a near-universal marker of Japanese masculinity. In the photograph of Chūemon and his family of 1872, Shōjirō and Naotarō still wear the topknot, but—perhaps because as a tailor of Western clothes he felt the need to cultivate a more Western image—Chūemon has cut off his topknot and grown out his hair. Married women’s custom of blackening their teeth was also officially discouraged after the turn of the 1870s and seems to have rapidly faded from use. The symbol of new government policies in regard to bodily habits was often the imperial family. By the early 1870s, the emperor and empress both dressed in Western clothes, the emperor had styled his hair in the Western fashion, and the empress had stopped blackening her teeth.128
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