Japan's Economy by Proxy in the Seventeenth Century: China, the N ...

Chapter 1

A World in Flux: Japan and the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The most obvious manifestation of Japanese involvement with the international economy, at least in the first third of the seventeenth century, was the shuinsen trade.¹ Although the Ashikaga shogun had sporadically used a similar system of “trade passes” in the early- to mid-Muromachi period, it only came to its full realization as a political and economic tool at the turn of the seventeenth century. We have no surviving documentation to prove that Hideyoshi issued shuinjō (trade passes) to his subjects, but it seems clear from later histories that he did in fact issue them to the wealthy merchants of Kyoto, Nagasaki, and Sakai.² As a method of political control, however, the shuinsen system was only fully instituted in 1604 when Tokugawa Ieyasu followed Hideyoshi’s lead and made it a requirement that all merchants trading abroad have a shogunal shuinjō.