The Merchant's Tale

by Simon Partner

      6.   Much of the Japanese scholarship on the Meiji era and beyond focuses on the emergence of an “emperor system,” in which a small group of oligarchs harnessed the legal and symbolic power of the emperor in pursuit of a capitalist and imperialist agenda. See, for example, Ōe Shinobu, Meiji kokka no seiritsu: Tennōsei seiritsushi kenkyū (Kyoto: Mineruva Shobō, 1998). A representative work in English translation is Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period. In English-language scholarship, a similar focus on the use of the emperor in the assertion of elite power can be found in, for example, Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). On Meiji-era industrial growth and institutional modernization, many works similarly focus on top-down initiatives. See, for example, D. Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Richard J. Samuels, “Rich Nation, Strong Army”: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

      7.   Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Laura Nenzi, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman’s Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2015); Laura Nenzi, “Portents and Politics: Two Women Activists on the Verge of the Meiji Restoration,” Journal of Japanese Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 1–23; Romulus Hillsborough, Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen Through the Eyes of the Shogun’s Last Samurai (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2014); Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawasaki Region (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1983); M. William Steele, Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

      8.   The major works on the restoration in English all focus (albeit in different ways) on the political, diplomatic, and ideological maneuverings that led to the collapse of the Tokugawa regime. See W. G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972); Conrad D. Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862–1868 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980); Paul Akamatsu, Meiji 1868: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Japan, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Harry D. Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).

      9.   See, for example, J. E. Hoare, Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements: The Uninvited Guests, 1858–1899 (Folkestone, Kent, U.K.: Japan Library, 1994); Peter Ennals, Opening a Window to the West: The Foreign Concession at Kōbe, Japan, 1868–1899 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); M. Paske-Smith, Western Barbarians in Japan and Formosa in Tokugawa Days, 1603–1868 (Kobe: Thompson, 1930); Brian Burke-Gaffney, Nagasaki: The British Experience, 1854–1945 (Folkestone, Kent, U.K.: Global Oriental, 2009); Hugh Cortazzi, Victorians in Japan: In and around the Treaty Ports (London: Athlone Press, 1987); Harold S. Williams, Foreigners in Mikadoland (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1972).

    10.   Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

    11.   For a review essay on the Chinese historiography, see Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman, introduction to Twentieth-Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World (Milton Park, Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2012). Rhoads Murphey is one of the few scholars to study the impact of the Chinese ports beyond politics and ideology, though his analysis is limited mostly to the economic impact, which in any case he finds was minimal (The Treaty Ports and China’s Modernization: What Went Wrong? Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no. 7 [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1970]).

    12.   My approach here has something in common with that of Catherine Phipps, although her fascinating work on Moji focuses on the emergence of Japanese imperialism in a later period, and Moji itself was not a formal treaty port (Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899, Harvard East Asian Monographs 373 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015]).

    13.   John Reddie Black, Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1880), 1:163–64. For a more historically informed examination of time consciousness in Japan, see Nishimoto Ikuko, Jikan ishiki no kindai: “Toki wa kane nari” no shakaishi (Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2006).

    14.   Simon Partner, The Mayor of Aihara: A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), chapter 3.

    15.   Rutherford Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan, 2 vols. (New York: Bradley, 1863), 2:240.

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