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

This, however, was most certainly not the case; rather, the Japanese economy continued to have a tremendous impact on the Asian mainland even after the implementation of the sakoku decrees. The relationship between the Japanese economy and the economy of the wider world was somewhat obfuscated insofar as Japanese merchants were no longer the primary agents of this economic activity; and it is this situation that makes it all too easy to overlook Japan’s role in the world economy after the “closed country” policies had been set in place.

So much of our traditional understanding of what this period represents—both for Japan as a “country” and the region as a whole—is still subject to misunderstanding. Even the very name by which historians have come to call this period is highly misleading. Sakoku literally means “closed country;” the fact that this is by no means an accurate description of Japan’s political situation from the seventeenth century has not translated into a more appropriate label for this period, although certainly the term “early modern” (kinsei) is becoming more widespread.¹

The Japanese economic influence on Asia in the seventeenth century was tremendous. Even when the Japanese government resolved to limit its contact with Europeans by expelling first the Spanish and then the Portuguese, as well as deciding to prohibit its own citizens from traveling abroad, the Japanese economy remained a force in Asia and indeed played a significant role in the world economy as well. Recent scholarship has done a good job of demonstrating that Japan, once thought to be isolated from the wider world, was in fact pursuing a careful policy of diplomatic relations with the Korean and the Ryukyu Islanders. And even though the bakufu had no official diplomatic relations with China and the Netherlands, those two countries maintained a vigorous trade in Japan throughout the first century of the sakoku era.² The seventeenth-century economy of Japan, however, was an “economy by proxy” since the agents that exchanged Asian and European luxury goods for Japanese products and precious metals were not Japanese, but rather Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Ryukyu Islanders. These peoples moved in to fill the economic gap left by the forced exclusion of the native Japanese merchants from an active role in the foreign economy.³ This book will attempt to show the tremendous impact that this Japanese “economy by proxy” had on Asia and on the foreigners trading in Japan in the seventeenth century.