Foreign Trade in Tokugawa Japan

Abstract

Despite common portrayals, Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) was not a completely isolated or closed state that turned away from foreign trade. Instead, it maintained consistent but limited trading links with other Asian states and groups, as well as with the Dutch East India Company. The structure of foreign trade was defined by early modern Japan’s political system, in which the Tokugawa shogunate ruled as the central authority, dominating roughly 260 lords who exercised broad autonomy within their individual feudal domains. The Tokugawa shogunate directly administered trade with Chinese and Dutch merchants at the port of Nagasaki. However, in the north, the Matsumae domain controlled trade with Indigenous Ainu tribes, while to the west, the Tsushima domain maintained commercial ties with Chosŏn Korea. To the south, the Satsuma domain manipulated to its benefit the foreign trade of the Ryukyu Kingdom, over which it exercised suzerainty. In response to internal and external trends, the shogunate periodically revised the parameters of foreign trade. During the first century of the Tokugawa era, Japan’s foreign trade centered on exporting silver to China, in exchange for silk. In the mid-18th century, Japan definitively ended silver exports, focusing instead on exporting copper and marine products, which were used to obtain medicinal goods, primarily from China. Under Western military and diplomatic pressure, in the late 1850s, the Tokugawa shogunate signed a series of treaties with Western states that reshaped the structure of foreign trade. Beginning in 1859, Western and other foreign merchants began to reside in three treaty ports that became the main venues of foreign commerce. Japan’s foreign trade thus transitioned from a focus on exchanges with China and other Asian states. Instead, foreign trade, especially exports of silk and tea, centered on Western nations, a trend that accelerated in the closing years of the Tokugawa period.