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

Finally, although Japanese scholars have dealt with Japan’s foreign trade after sakoku in somewhat more detail, there is still a marked tendency to concentrate on the internal economic development of the country. The establishment of national and domainal rice markets that served to change rice into cash (thereby servicing a growing urban population), the development of a system of credit and a futures market that went hand in hand with these rice markets, and an “industrious revolution” have all been studied rather extensively and have been used to show that Japan contained within itself the “sprouts of capitalism” that allowed it to adjust so rapidly to a radically different world in the nineteenth century.⁷

My purpose is to build on this tremendous body of scholarship and to evaluate the true nature of the Japanese economy in the seventeenth century as it pertained to the wider world, particularly the Asian continent and the Dutch East India Company. Chapter 2 will deal with the role of the shuinsen (red-seal ships) in Japanese trade with Asia.⁸ Even at the height of Portuguese and Chinese commercial involvement in Japan, the trade carried in Japanese ships dwarfed that of any other party, as Japanese merchants themselves distributed a vast amount of silver throughout Asia. It was of course the sheer amount of Japanese precious metals carried in the shuinsen that made Japan such an undeniable economic force in early modern Asia. Chapter 3, therefore, provides a detailed analysis of the technological changes that allowed the Japanese to exploit their mines to such effect, as well as the role of Japanese silver in seventeenth-century trade. Chapter 4 will deal with the function of Taiwan as a convenient meeting place for illicit Chinese-Japanese trade, and later as a strategic link connecting the economies of Japan and Asia that the Dutch were able to exploit to such advantage. Taiwan became a central node in Asian trade after the bakufu banned Japanese merchants from leaving the country, allowing the VOC to move into the lucrative role of middleman between Japan and Asia.

The primary groups to benefit from the trade between Japan and Asia after the institution of the sakoku decrees were the Dutch and the Chinese, although the Korean and the Ryukyu Islanders also shared in the great wealth Japan had to offer.