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

Not only were these permits issued to merchants, but they were also given to daimyo, bakufu officials, foreigners, and even to two women. Iwao Seiichi notes that in the course of the three decades in which the shuinjō were used, a total of 355 were issued for trade at nineteen different locations in Southeast Asia.³ Although the number of ships sailing abroad dropped precipitously as the period drew to a close, seven major families were still allowed to send ships to Tonkin, Cochin, and Siam on a regular basis. The frequency with which the Japanese sent ships to these areas led to the formation of nihonmachi, the semi-autonomous enclaves of ethnic Japanese who lived together in a foreign country. The two biggest settlements were located in Dilao (a town just outside of Manila in the Philippines) and in Ayuthia (the capital city of Siam). Dilao, at the height of its prosperity in the early 1620s, had 3,000 Japanese residents, while in 1626, there were 1,700 Japanese who lived in the nihonmachi in Siam.⁴ These settlements were, in a very real sense, semi-autonomous regions insofar as the Japanese often answered to their own officials and usually lived separately from the rest of the native population. Other areas with sizeable Japanese enclaves included Tonkin, Cambodia, Malacca, Batavia, Macao, Cochin, Burma, and Korea. It is quite clear from this brief introduction that the Japanese represented a significant presence throughout Asia in the early seventeenth century.

Tokugawa Ieyasu exemplifies this outward-looking attitude of the early modern Japanese; to cite a suitably metaphoric example, according to an entry in the Tokugawa Jikki for 1611, Ieyasu made a point of studying conditions in foreign countries with the aid of a world map that had, in all likelihood, been imported by Europeans.⁵ Even before he assumed the title of shogun in 1603, Ieyasu had sent letters to Southeast Asian rulers in his capacity as one of five regents for the young Toyotomi heir, Hideyori. Upon his assumption of the title of shogun, he began in earnest to work towards peaceful relations with his neighbors. The priest Sūden, Ieyasu’s chief foreign policy advisor, included in his Ikoku Nikki letters from the shogun to almost every major country in Asia, in which the shogun expressed a desire for peaceful commercial relations.⁶