The On-the-Ground Political Authority of the Nagasaki Magistrate in the Regulation of Chan Monks from Jiangnan and Fujian (Mid-Seventeenth–Early Eighteenth Centuries)

Abstract

Since the early seventeenth century, Chan monks from Jiangnan and Fujian traveled to Japan amid a commercial boom in maritime East Asia starting from the late sixteenth century. After the promulgation of Sakoku (鎖国, closed country) by the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1630s and 1640s, Nagasaki turned out to be the first stop for these incoming Chan monks. From 1654 to 1658, the Nagasaki magistrate revealed a supportive stance and demonstrated a high level of on-the-ground political authority in regulating the Chan monks from 1658 to 1692. However, because of rapidly increasing incoming Continental merchants in the mid-1680s, the shogunate tightened Nagasaki trade policies by adopting the Jōdaka system. Around the time when Kawaguchi Munetsune left the position of the Nagasaki magistrate in 1693, the shogunate took a more active stance on Nagasaki affairs thereafter, and the Nagasaki magistrate's on-the-ground political authority fell into decline.