CHAPTER XXVI
Portuguese Trade to Japan—Dutch Trade—Silver, Gold, and Copper the Chief Articles of Export—Export of Silver prohibited—Chinese Trade—Its Increase after the Accession of the Manchu Dynasty—Chinese Temples at Nagasaki—A Buddhist Doctor from China—Edict on the Subject of Household Worship—Restrictions on the Dutch Trade—Increase in the Number of Chinese Visitors to Nagasaki—Their Objects—Restrictions on the Chinese Trade—The Chinese shut up in a Factory—Trade with Lew Chew [Riūkiū]—A. D. 1542-1690.
Of the real value and extent of the trade which for some ninety years the Portuguese carried on with Japan, and which was brought to a final close in the year 1638, we have no means of forming any very exact estimate. When we read in writers of two or three centuries ago glowing accounts of immense commercial profits, we must also recollect that, compared with the commerce of the present day, the trade upon which these great profits were made was exceedingly limited in amount.
For more than half of the above period of ninety years the intercourse of the Portuguese with Japan seems to have been reduced, or nearly so, to a single annual ship, known as the great carac of Macao, sent annually from that city, and laden chiefly with China silks, every Portuguese citizen of Macao having the right, if he chose to exercise it, of putting on board a certain number of packages, as did also the Society of Jesus, which had a college and a commercial agency in that city. Of this traffic the following account is given by Ralph Fitch, an intelligent Englishman, who was in Malacca in the year 1588[127]: “When the Portuguese go from Macao in China to Japan, they carry much white silk, gold, musk, and porcelains, and they bring from thence nothing but silver. They have a great carac, which goeth thither every year, and she bringeth from thence every year about six hundred thousand crusados (not far from as many dollars); and all this silver of Japan, and two hundred thousand crusados more in silver, which they bring yearly out of India, they employ to their advantage in China; and they bring from thence gold, musk, silk, porcelains, and many other things very costly and gilded.”[128]
If we allow to the Portuguese an annual average export of half a million of dollars, that will make in ninety years forty-five millions of dollars of silver carried away by the Portuguese; for, according to all accounts, they brought away nothing else.
Though the Spaniards were never allowed to trade to Japan, at one period, as we have seen, a considerable number of Japanese junks frequented Manila for the purchase of Chinese goods; but this trade was brought to an end in 1624, in consequence of the facilities which it afforded for the introduction of Catholic priests into Japan.
Map of Feudal Japan
The Dutch trade began in 1609. We have seen that in a short time it gained a very considerable extent; and it increased, as the trading establishment which the Dutch gradually obtained in India and Persia, and that on the island of Formosa, whence they had access to China, furnishing them with a supply of rich silks, the great article of import into Japan. As the Portuguese trade was carried on from Macao, so the Dutch trade was carried on, not from Holland, but from Batavia. The year preceding the shutting up of the Dutch in Deshima is stated to have been the most profitable of any. The previous average sales in Japan had been about sixty tons of gold; but that year the Dutch had imported and disposed of goods to the value of eighty tons of gold (that is, three million two hundred thousand dollars, a Dutch ton of gold being one hundred thousand florins, or forty thousand dollars). Among the exports were fourteen hundred chests of silver, each chest containing one thousand taels, or near two million dollars in silver alone[129]. About this time, however, owing to the comparative exhaustion of the silver, or the comparative increase of gold, that metal became a leading, as, indeed, it seems to have been before a considerable article of export with the Dutch. The gold koban, the national coin of the Japanese, weighed at this time forty-seven kanderins, that is, two hundred and seventy-four grains troy, which is sixteen grains more than our present eagle. But, if superior in weight, the koban was inferior in fineness, containing of pure gold only two hundred and twenty-four grains, whereas the eagle contains two hundred and thirty-two grains. It passed in Japan and was purchased by the Dutch for six taels or less in silver, which enabled them to dispose of it to good advantage on the coast of Coromandel, where the relative value of gold was much higher. In the two years, 1670, 1671, more than one hundred thousand koban were exported, at a profit of a million florins; and down to that time the Dutch sent annually to Japan five or six ships a year. In 1644, the export of copper began, and went on gradually increasing. In 1671, an edict was issued, prohibiting the further export of silver; but this gave no concern to the Dutch, who had already ceased to export it. Its principal operation was against the Chinese, who at this time carried on a great trade to Japan.
Of the early commercial relations of China and Japan our knowledge is very limited. As the Japanese at an early era, according to their own annals (constructed, it is probable, by Buddhist priests), as early as A. D. 600, had received from China Buddhist missionaries, and through them the language, graphic characters, science, etc., of the Chinese, it would seem probable that some commercial intercourse must have early existed between these two nations. If so, however, the threatened Mongol invasion, towards the end of the thirteenth century, would have been likely to have interrupted it. The native Chinese dynasty, which succeeded after the expulsion of the Mongols, was exceedingly jealous of all strangers and hostile to intercourse with them. No foreign trade was allowed, and every Chinese who left his country incurred a sentence of perpetual banishment. It is true that the Chinese colonists, that had emigrated, perhaps on the invasion of the Mongols, and had settled in the neighboring maritime countries (as others did afterwards on the invasion of the present Manchu dynasty), still contrived to keep up some intercourse with China, while they carried on a vigorous trade with the adjacent islands and countries; but, at the time of the Portuguese discovery, no such trade would seem to have existed with Japan.
The Manchu dynasty (the same now reigning), which mounted the throne in 1644, was much less hostile to foreigners; and under their rule the Chinese trade to Japan appears to have rapidly increased. This was partly by vessels direct from China, and partly by the commercial enterprise of the Chinese fugitives who possessed themselves of Formosa, from which, in 1662, they drove out the Dutch, or who had settled elsewhere on the islands and coasts of southeastern Asia.
“They come over,” says Kämpfer, “when and with what numbers of people, junks, and goods they pleased. So extensive and advantageous a liberty could not but be very pleasing to them, and put them upon thoughts of a surer establishment, in order to which, and for the free exercise of their religion, they built three temples at Nagasaki, according to the three chief languages spoken by them (those of the northern, middle, and southern provinces), each to be attended by priests of their own nation, to be sent over from China.”[130]
These temples, called, each in the special dialect of its frequenters, “Temples of Riches,”—the god which the Chinese chiefly worship,—are described by Kämpfer, from his own observation, as remarkable for their handsome structure and the number of monks or Buddhist clergy attached to them. As soon as any Chinese ships arrived in the harbor, the crews immediately took on shore the idols which formed a part of the ship’s outfit, and placed them in some small chapels, built for that purpose, near by the large temples, or convents as in fact they rather were. This was done with uncommon respect and particular ceremonies, playing upon cymbals and beating of drums, which same ceremonies were repeated when, upon the departure of the junks, the idols were carried on board again.
Encouraged by this favorable reception of his countrymen, Ingen, who was at that time at the head of the Buddhist priesthood of China, claiming to be the twenty-eighth in succession from the founder of the Chinese Buddhist patriarchate, surrendered to a successor his high dignity at home, and in the year 1653 came over to Japan, there to establish a sort of caliphate or archiepiscopal see, as Kämpfer expresses it, of the particular branch or sect of the Buddhist faith to which he belonged. “The princes and lords of several provinces came to compliment him, clad in their kamishimo,[131] or garments of ceremony. The emperor offered him for his residence a mountain in the neighborhood of the holy city of Miyako, which he called Ōbaku, the name of his former papal residence in China. An incident which happened soon after his arrival contributed very much to forward his designs, and raised an uncommon respect for his person, and a great opinion of his holiness. After a very great drought, the country people, his neighbors, desired him to say a kitō, or extraordinary solemn prayer, in order to obtain rain. He answered that it was not in his power to make rain, and that he could not assure them that his kitō would obtain it. However, at their pressing instances, he promised to do his utmost. Accordingly, he went up to the top of the mountain and made his kitō. The next day there fell such profuse showers as even to wash away the smaller bridges in the city of Miyako, which made both the city and country believe that his kitō had been rather too strong. His companions, who came over with him from China, had likewise very great respect paid them, as more immediate partakers of his glory; so that even a cook, who came over with this learned and sanctified company, was raised to the dignity of superior of one of the three convents of Nagasaki, where, by his sublime understanding and reputed great knowledge, he obtained,” and in Kämpfer’s time still held, “the name and repute of a Godō, that is, a person blessed with divine and most acute understanding, whom they suppose to be able to find out by his Satori, or Enthusiastic Speculations, such mysterious truths as are far beyond the reach of common knowledge.”
What tended to favor Ingen’s design was an edict lately issued by the emperor, aimed at the few remaining Catholics, and also at the sect of the Judō, or Moralists, requiring everybody to belong to some sect of the recognized religions of Japan, and to have a Zushi in their houses,—that is, a corner or altar consecrated to some idol. Nevertheless, in spite of his favorable reception and eminent learning and sanctity, Ingen failed to gain the submission of the various Buddhist sects in Japan; nor was his spiritual headship acknowledged, except by the three Chinese convents.
Though the prohibition of the export of silver, mentioned as having taken place in 1671, did not affect the Dutch, the very next year the Japanese commenced a system of measures which, within a quarter of a century, reduced the Dutch commerce to the very narrow limit at which it has ever since remained. The first step was to raise the value of the koban to six tael eight maas of silver; nor was this by any means the worst of it. The Dutch were no longer allowed to sell to the native merchants. The government appointed appraisers, who set a certain value on the goods, much less than the old prices, at which valuation the Dutch must sell, or else take the goods away. Anything which the goods sold for to the Japanese merchants, over the appraisement, went into the town treasury of Nagasaki.[132] These appraisements grew lower and lower every year, till at last the Dutch, threatening, if things went on in this way, to abandon the trade altogether, petitioned the emperor to be restored to their ancient privileges, assured to them by the concession of Gongen-Sama [Iyeyasu]. After waiting three years, they got a gracious answer. The appraisements were abolished, but at the same time, in 1685, an order was suddenly issued, limiting the amount which the Dutch might sell in any one year to the value of a hundred thousand taels, or in Dutch money to ten tons and a half of gold, equal to four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. All the goods of any one year’s importation, remaining after that amount had been realized, were to lie over till the next annual sale. At the same time, the annual export of copper was limited to twenty-five thousand piculs; and so matters stood at the time of Kämpfer’s visit.
The Chinese trade had meanwhile gone on increasing “to that degree”—we quote again from Kämpfer—“as to make the suspicious and circumspect Japanese extremely jealous of them. In the years 1683 and 1684 there arrived at Nagasaki, in each year, at least two hundred junks, every junk with not less than fifty people on board, making for each year more than ten thousand Chinese visitors.” Nor was it trade alone that drew the Chinese thither. In China, the women, except those of servile condition, are kept in perfect seclusion. No man sees even the woman he is to marry till she has actually become his wife; and courtesanship is strictly forbidden and punished. The case, as we have seen, is widely different in Japan, and numerous young and wealthy Chinese were attracted to Nagasaki, “purely for their pleasure,” as Kämpfer observes, “and to spend some part of their money with Japanese wenches, which proved very beneficial to that town,”—truly a very mercantile view of the matter!
“Not only did this increasing number of Chinese visitors excite jealousy, but what still more aroused the suspicion of the Japanese was, that the Jesuits, having gained the favor of the then reigning monarch of China, (the celebrated Kanghi), with the liberty of preaching and propagating their religion in all parts of the empire, some tracts and books, which the Jesuit fathers had found the means to print in China, in Chinese characters, were brought over to Japan among other Chinese books, and sold privately, which made the Japanese apprehensive that by this means the Catholic religion, which had been exterminated with so much trouble and the loss of so many thousand persons, might be revived again in the country.” And they even suspected that the importers of these books, if not actual converts, were at least favorers of the Catholic doctrine.
These reasons combined to produce, in 1684, at the same time with the restrictions placed upon the Dutch, an edict, by which the Chinese were limited to an annual importation, double the value of that allowed the Dutch; namely, six hundred thousand taels, equivalent to eight hundred and forty thousand dollars, the annual number of junks not to exceed seventy, of which a specific number was assigned to each province and colony, and each to bring not more than thirty persons. Chinese books were, at the same time, subjected to a censorship, two censors being appointed, one for theological, the other for historical and scientific works, none to be imported without their approval.
This was followed up, in the year 1688, by another order, by which the Chinese were, like the Dutch, shut up in a sort of prison, for which, like the Dutch, they were compelled to pay a heavy rent. The site chosen for this spot was a garden, pleasantly situated, just outside of the town, on the side of the harbor opposite Deshima. It was covered with several rows of small houses, each row having a common roof, and the whole was surrounded with a ditch and a strong palisade, from which the only exit was through well-guarded double gates[133]. Even here the Chinese had no permanent residence, like the Dutch. They arrived in detachments, twenty junks in spring, thirty in summer, and twenty in autumn; and, after selling their goods, went away, leaving the houses empty.
Besides the trade with the Dutch and the Chinese, the Lew Chew Islands [Riūkiū] were also permitted to carry on a particular trade with the province of Satsuma, the prince of which they acknowledged as in some respects their sovereign. The import and sale of their goods was limited to the annual amount of one hundred and twenty-five thousand taels, though, in Kämpfer’s time, a much larger amount was smuggled in, large quantities of Chinese goods being thus introduced.