The Merchant's Tale

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In April 1859, at age fifty, Shinohara Chūemon left his old life behind. Chūemon, a well-off farmer in his home village, departed for the new port city of Yokohama, where he remained for the next fourteen years. There, as a merchant trading with foreigners in the aftermath of Japan's 1853 "opening" to the West, he witnessed the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, the civil war that followed, and the Meiji Restoration's reforms. The Merchant's Tale looks through Chūemon's eyes at the upheavals of this period, using the story of an ordinary merchant farmer and its Yokohama setting as a vantage point onto sweeping social transformation and its unwitting agents.In a narrative history rich in colorful detail, Simon Partner focuses on Japan's common people to investigate the relationship between individual motivation and social change. Chūemon, like most newcomers to Yokohama, came in search of economic opportunity. Partner explores how he and other mundane actors in...