But media representations of Japan also offered competing interpretations—some influenced by Japanese artists, artisans, and performers who were operating in the same commercial spaces as the foreigners. They portrayed Japan as a nation of physical and technical prowess, a place capable of producing both unforgettable acrobatic performance and an extraordinary level of craftsmanship. And Japanese artistic traditions were held up as a model from which the rest of the world could learn. From the 1860s through the end of the nineteenth century, a craze for japonisme had a profound effect on the visual arts and a noticeable effect on literature, philosophy, and religion. Of course, these representations quickly came to transcend the narrow physical space of Yokohama, which was anyway seen by many as a barrier to understanding the “true” Japan. But at least in the early years, Yokohama was where “Japan” was on display.
Finally, the story of Chūemon offers intriguing glimpses into the complex relationship between personal desire and large-scale political and social transformations. There was much in Chūemon’s circumstances that he could not control. The Meiji Restoration would have followed the same path whether Chūemon had been pro-shogunate or pro-emperor, whether he had moved to Yokohama or stayed in Kōshū. But there is much to be learned from the decisions Chūemon made and the actions he took in areas where he did feel that he had control.
One of the first questions raised by the story of Chūemon’s life in Yokohama is why he decided to go there in the first place. Why do people go from one place to another, why do they risk what they have in the hope of something better? Chūemon was neither poor nor desperate. He was at or close to retirement age, surrounded by family and friends. He enjoyed all the comforts and privileges that the life of an elite villager afforded. His decision to move and open a shop in Yokohama remains something of a mystery—particularly given how small a number of applicants there were from outside the Edo–Kanagawa area.
Chūemon was undoubtedly motivated by the entrepreneurial urge to seize a new opportunity to make money. Although we might justifiably label him as conservative in his political affiliations and even in his daily life, he was never conservative in the field of commerce. Whenever Chūemon saw opportunity—whether it was in a new product, a new market, or even an entirely new field of enterprise (such as mining), Chūemon seems to have been ready to jump into the fray. This urge never left him—he remained a firm believer in the possibilities of Yokohama throughout his time there.
Of course, his confidence was bolstered by the well-established commercial network connecting Kōshū with the Kantō Plain. But in Chūemon’s case, there must have been something more—something he felt that set him apart from countless other elite villagers throughout the Edo hinterland. What was that “something”? Of course, we will never know the whole story. Was he bored with village life? Was there tension in his family? Was he frustrated by his duties as village officer? The letters unfortunately give no hint. But one thing seems sure: Chūemon did not view his project as only a personal enterprise. He saw himself as representative of a “Kōshū Products Company,” an informal collective of relatives and elite villagers throughout the region, who would use his Yokohama establishment as an outlet for their varied produce. Most of their products were agricultural, so by representing the villagers of his region, Chūemon hoped both to enrich the local farming community and to increase the wealth of his business network. That network in turn was able to provide Chūemon with investment capital, inventory, and emotional support throughout his long stay in Yokohama.
As a merchant intermediary between the global market outlet of Yokohama and the Kōshū agricultural hinterland, Chūemon undoubtedly helped facilitate the transformations wrought by Japan’s new center of international trade. But the impetus in Chūemon’s case was not ideological, or political, or intellectual. Chūemon sought economic betterment for himself, his family, and his friends. Probably the same can be said of most of the thousands of people, Japanese and foreign, who flocked to Yokohama during the 1860s, turning it into one of the most dynamic centers of enterprise in Japan. This, surely, has been one of the great driving factors in social transformation throughout history.
One might well ask what anyone can learn from studying a single individual—especially a man who was not one of the movers or shakers of his time. I hope that one justification for undertaking a study like this is simply that people’s lives are interesting. Why, after all, do we study history if not to try to grasp the essential humanity underlying the manifold paths of our planet’s cultures and societies? Historians are—in spite of all their efforts to remodel themselves as something more scientific—still storytellers, and it is indeed the human stories of history that help us engage imaginatively with the past. While it is easy to understand the value of studying the lives of the rich and powerful, there is also much to be gained from the stories of ordinary people—people who can help us understand history as it was experienced at the time; people who did not make the history that changed our lives but who lived it.
The stories of ordinary people’s lives can also inform our understanding of broader histories in unexpected ways. Historians construct narratives about the past, and by the time those narratives find their way into the textbooks, they are often understood as the “true” story, even though experience tells us that the dominant historical narratives of today will likely end up in tomorrow’s historical dustbin. At the very least, the study of individual lives reminds us that, within the larger framework of historical change, there were countless variations in individual experience. By examining the ways in which Chūemon’s life intersected with, and diverged from, the dominant narratives of the restoration era, I have suggested ways in which we might question or better inform those narratives. For the most part, Chūemon was not a participant in the political initiatives and modernizing fervor that are widely credited with having transformed Japan into a unified, modern, imperial nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, as I have shown throughout this book, Chūemon was deeply committed to the commercial potential of Japan’s new global trading regime. In great part the commercial transactions of Chūemon and countless others like him took place against a background of grudging consent or even hostility from the movers and shakers of his day. And yet those transactions contributed to a radical reorientation of Japan’s material, social, cultural, technological, and ideological landscapes, even before the modernizing reforms of the new Meiji government took effect.
For all the importance of analyzing Chūemon’s life in the context of his historical era, we are ultimately left with the story of a human being—individual, idiosyncratic, complex, and contradictory. Who, in the end, was Shinohara Chūemon?
He was above all, I think, a man of Kōshū. This may seem a strange thing to say when Chūemon lived in Yokohama through the entire period of this study, and indeed even tried to persuade his son to leave the ancestral home and move to Yokohama to join him. But it is hard to imagine that Chūemon would ever have truly shaken off his identity as a member of the Higashi-Aburakawa village elite. Throughout his years in Yokohama, his friends, relatives, and business associates in Kōshū remained his primary community. He remained deeply concerned in village affairs, which he frequently discussed in his letters to his son Shōjirō. And, in the end, he returned to Kōshū to live out his final years and to be buried in the family plot in Senryūji temple.
And Chūemon was an extraordinary entrepreneur. This was an era in which rural entrepreneurship was a vital driver of village economies: most villagers in the Edo hinterland, if they had the means to do so, combined some level of commercial enterprise with their farming activities. But at the age of fifty, it was truly a bold step for Chūemon to risk so many of the good things he had in his life for the uncertain prospects of a new venture in Yokohama. And once he was established there, Chūemon displayed his entrepreneurial instincts again and again. Always on the lookout for competitive advantage, he jumped on oppo
rtunity when he saw it. Armed with little more than a desire to succeed, he was able to carve out a space for himself in a succession of products by making the most of his advantages. Even when his business was doing well, Chūemon never stopped to consolidate: he was always looking for the next big thing, whether it was silkworm eggs, innkeeping, or money lending. I imagine that Chūemon must have had what we now think of as the classic entrepreneurial personality—restless, hyperactive, and drawn to risk and adventure.
Related to his entrepreneurial personality was Chūemon’s optimism. Even as he faced a daunting variety of challenges, including financial difficulties, heavy indebtedness, price collapses, the threat of war, heavy taxation, and bureaucratic meddling with trade, Chūemon maintained a steadfastly hopeful attitude about the future. I am particularly struck by his venture into the charcoal business in 1861. His business at this time was suffering from every kind of affliction. He had no inventory in his shop, no money to buy more, he was deep in debt to his business partners, he owed large sums of money in municipal fees and to pay for a new storehouse, his entire family was disabled with scabies, and he had mortgaged his house and pawned all his wife’s kimonos just to cover his living expenses. And yet in the midst of this dark period, Chūemon’s mind turned to a new opportunity. Mortgaging his last remaining piece of property, he sent his son off to Kōshū with his last forty ryō in the world, charging him with shipping charcoal to Yokohama in the hope of exploiting a market opportunity. In the same way, Chūemon seized the opportunities that he saw in raw cotton, silkworm eggs, quartz mining, innkeeping, and tailoring. In every case he fixed his gaze on the future with optimism and enthusiasm. It is one of his most appealing features.
Chūemon was also a loyal and loving family man. His letters, which dwell mostly on business affairs, give us much less than I would like of his family relationships. I do not know if he was a kind husband and father, or even a faithful one. I know that his relationship with his second son Naotarō was strained at times, but in the end Chūemon stood by his son and nurtured him as he took on a growing role in Chūemon’s business affairs. In his letters to his oldest son, Shōjirō, Chūemon consistently shows affection and concern over a period of many years. He talks of his youngest son, Katsusuke, with indulgent affection. And it is also clear from the letters that Chūemon respects and admires his wife—though he reveals nothing about their relationship beyond that. We know that Chūemon had at least six surviving children, and even though he was far away from most of them, he took his responsibilities as a father seriously, worrying about the health of his daughters back in Kōshū and doing his best to ensure they were well married. And beyond his immediate family, Chūemon was deeply concerned to fulfill his filial duties toward his extended family, particularly his in-laws, the Okamura family.
Chūemon’s life has become significant because the ravages of fire, earthquake, and war have left his collection of letters to his home village as one of the most important remaining archival sources on the daily life and economic activities of a member of the merchant community in Yokohama in the 1860s. In this sense, the letters are a precious historical resource, and I hope I have done them even partial justice by developing the rich insights they offer.
But it would be a shame to conclude that an individual’s only significance is the coincidence that his records happen to have survived. I choose to see a more personal meaning in Chūemon’s story. The collection of letters is enough to reveal Chūemon as a man with a deeply rooted personal identity, with strong family ties, incurably optimistic, but also with a restless streak that drove him constantly to undertake new ventures and take on new risks. He is a man who, though I might not be friends with him, I would recognize if I met him today. Indeed, I feel in a way that I have met him. He has left a remarkably direct line to the present day, as his great-great-grandson farms the same land, lives in the same house a stone’s throw from Chūemon’s grave, and is willing to share a hot early summer’s afternoon with a visiting foreigner and graciously tell him the lore that has come down to him over the generations.
The most strikingly recognizable feature of Chūemon the man, as he reaches out to me across a century and a half of dramatic change, is his powerful urge to seek out opportunity and grasp it wherever he finds it. I started this book with the question, why did Shinohara Chūemon, fifty years old, affluent, respected, surrounded by family and friends, in a village where he was a recognized leader, turn his back on all those blessings to start on a completely new—and very risky—enterprise in a town that did not yet exist, trading with foreigners whom he had never before encountered? I can never know Chūemon well enough to fully answer my question. But much of the answer surely lies in Chūemon’s strong urge to seek new economic opportunity, for the benefit of himself and his family. It seems to me that this urge, played out countless times on a greater or lesser scale, is one of the fundamental realities of man’s historical experience. Regardless of culture, era, religion, politics, or education, men and women have thrown their energies into seeking economic opportunity in the hope of improving their daily lives. Perhaps even more than kings and generals and their wars, it is the driving force of historical change.
TABLES
Table 1
Exports and imports through Yokohama, 1859–1867 (in Mexican dollars)
Year
Exports
Imports
1859
400,000
150,000
1860
3,954,299
945,714
1861
2,682,952
14,943,154
1862
6,305,128
3,074,231
1863
10,554,022
3,701,084
1864
8,997,484
5,553,594
1865
17,467,728
13,153,024
1866
14,100,000
11,735,000
1867
9,708,907
14,908,785
Source: Yokohama Zeikan, Yokohama zeikan hyakunijū-nenshi (Yokohama: Yokohama Zeikan, 1981), 24.
Note: There are wide variations in estimates for these statistics. This table uses a variety of sources that reflect the debate.
Table 2
Estimates of Yokohama population, 1859–1870
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
British
18
50
61
98
American
15
43
43
97
Dutch
10
22
28
33
French
1
12
12
52
Portuguese
6
9
Prussian
19
Chinese
100
660
1,002
Japanese
3,046
8,297
9,200
12,000
28,589
Total
482
14,581
31,000
Sources: Ishii Takashi, Kōto Yokohama no tanjō (Yokohama: Yūrindō, 1976), 225; The China Directory, various years. Data are very incomplete.
Notes: Blank fields indicate missing data. Women are generally excluded from the statistics of foreigners and Chinese. The 1879 census put the total population registered in Yokohama at 46,187; however, the actual population may have been greater because of the large number of transients or residents registered in their places of origin.
Table 3
<
br /> Monetary values (in silver monme), 1859–1868
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
Ryō/koban
73.00
73.00
72.00
75.00
84.00
89.00
101.00
115.00
127.00
216.00
Bu
18.25
18.25
18.00
18.75
21.00
22.25
25.25
28.75
31.75
54.00
Monme
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
Kan
6.85
6.53
6.26
6.39
6.44
6.46
6.68
7.87
8.80
13.09
Mon
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.01
Tenpō
0.69
0.65
0.63
0.64
0.64
0.65
0.67
0.79
The Merchant's Tale Page 31