The question of how Japan was able to successfully “modernize” in the nineteenth century apparently still attracts serious scholarly attention. Two recent studies offer new perspectives on this question by examining the transnational flows of people, information, and trade goods in the treaty port of Yokohama. While previous studies of the treaty ports relied heavily on Western accounts, these draw from Japanese sources to contribute a sense of Japanese agency to the familiar story of Japan's economic “opening” to the West. Nor do they place as much emphasis on international politics—there is scant mention, for instance, of extraterritoriality or the struggle for treaty revision.Footnote ¹ The focus instead is on Japan's adaptation to modern capitalism and burgeoning commerce with Europe and America. Amid our global turn toward populism and economic nationalism, these make for thought-provoking reading on the promise and consequence of global trade.

In addition, these two studies on Yokohama help us make sense of a local space as distinct from the national, like recent works have done for the city of Osaka and the so-called “second cities” of Japan.Footnote ² They highlight the city's cosmopolitan particularity within Japan. But they also articulate broader claims about the city's contributions to national history and Japanese modernity. The two books thus address local and national scales of analysis, and do so in distinct ways. There is much to be gained from reading both; they present competing ways of interweaving personal, local, regional, national, and international scales, even if they deal with many of the same topics and personages.

The merchant of Simon Partner's The Merchant's Tale is a man known as Shinohara Chūemon. Partner is able to reconstruct Chūemon's life with remarkable vividness in spite of the slenderness of Chūemon's documentary record—his surviving letters mainly describe mercantile matters, and only for the years 1859 through 1873. The result is a highly readable microhistorical account of an individual's experience of domestic upheaval and global encounter in the mid-nineteenth century. Chūemon was one of the enterprising merchants who applied for licenses to trade in Yokohama at the town's inauguration in 1859. Until he closed shop in 1873, he dealt in a remarkable array of products—including eggs, dried fish, animal bones, coal, cotton, socks, silk, silkworm eggs, and live animals—and engaged in a number of ventures—Western tailoring, money exchange, quartz mining, and running an inn. A shocking number of these can be classified as failures. His most successful trade items—cotton, raw silk, and silkworm eggs—were only temporarily profitable for him, but historically quite significant. In finding foreign buyers for products from his native province of Kōshū, he linked the hinterland with the entrepôt of Yokohama, and the global market beyond.

Chūemon's letters also promise a window into the consciousness of the common people. He recounted many of the international events that shook the shogunate, though not always accurately. In one amusing anecdote, he passed along the rumor that after the Restoration “Japan will be given to France. They say that the French flag is flying from Edo Castle” (Partner, p. 191). We can also see hints of an emerging identification with the larger national unit and a transformation of his worldview. However, Partner's conclusion that a Japanese identity emerged as a result of foreign contact in the treaty ports, while plausible, is only suggested in Chūemon's writings. It also deviates from other important studies that ascribe this development among the Japanese public to much later periods—for example, the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) or the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5).Footnote ³

Moreover, Partner argues that “the commercial culture of the treaty port,” of which Chūemon was a part, was instrumental in creating a modern Japan (Partner, p. xx). Not surprisingly, Chūemon's commerce-focused archive does not have the breadth of empirical detail to sustain this grander argument. Partner thus presents evidence from a range of sources, but they are heavily weighted toward English-language works familiar to most specialists.Footnote ⁴ As a synthesis, The Merchant's Tale is engagingly written and covers an impressive range of topics. The section on the urban space of Yokohama, much like the one Peter Ennals has done for Kobe, is fascinating.Footnote ⁵ But given the source material, these sections on life in Yokohama and the changes filtering out to the rest of Japan are less pathbreaking than Chūemon's story. In many instances, the work perpetuates earlier stereotypes of the shogunate as isolationist and thoroughly opposed to foreign contact.Footnote ⁶

Yasuhiro Makimura's Yokohama and the Silk Trade also covers the life of Chūemon.Footnote ⁷ In this work, however, he is one merchant in a much wider cast. While Partner is interested in the individual and his motives, Makimura is concerned with how private merchants in Yokohama transformed the economy of eastern Japan. And Chūemon, in comparison to many others, was at a particular disadvantage. Because his village was under direct shogunal rule, he was not able to gain domainal monopoly privileges. His strategy of risky leveraged speculation—dramatically narrated by Partner—is here shown to be possibly the best he could do under his circumstances.

With regard to the broader context, Makimura effectively shows how Tokugawa Japan's divided realm and fragmented economy contributed to the opening of Yokohama and the Meiji Restoration (Makimura, p. 141). The presentation of this background information is authoritative, but also densely argued. It covers four major shogunal responses to the commercialization of society and their related political debates. These sought to address the shogunate's increasingly dire fiscal circumstances and the financial struggles of their samurai vassals in eastern Japan. The central dilemma of this political economy was the dual role of the shogunate to defend the interests of the realm, and also the interests of the Tokugawa clan and their vassals. The shogunate's policies often lurched unpredictably between the two opposing priorities. And at the latter extreme, some officials within the shogunate itself—the senior minister Hotta Masayoshi and the maritime defense official Iwase Tadanari in particular—made the case for opening Japan to foreign trade. Makimura delivers a bombshell here in arguing that it was Hotta who decided to open Yokohama to trade a full year prior to his meeting with US Consul-General Townsend Harris in 1857 (Makimura, p. 26).Footnote ⁸ His motive was to enrich the shogunate and deliver economic benefits to its power base in the east. But in carrying this out, Hotta and his supporters unwittingly undermined the ritual and ideological foundations of Tokugawa authority over the realm.

The private and domainal trade that then flourished in Yokohama did not rescue the shogunate. But international trade did make the region of eastern Japan the economic center of the country by the end of the nineteenth century. With abundant reference to trade data, Makimura lucidly shows how it was the success of cotton, silkworm eggs, and raw silk as export products that drove this development. And it took more than pluck and entrepreneurial ambition to bring this to fruition. Makimura acknowledges that Japan was “lucky” to have had opportunities to export cotton during the American Civil War, and silkworm eggs and raw silk during the Chinese Taiping Rebellion and the pébrine blight in Europe. Another stroke of luck might have been the fact that Japan was not a significant market for the British, and therefore the British were willing to tolerate trade deficits without resorting to selling opium (Makimura, p. 216). But Japan's export industries were not generated from luck alone. They arose from import substitution policies and the commercialization of Japan's metropolitan hinterlands dating to the mid-Tokugawa era. And, as Chinese exports of silk resumed and European production recovered from the blight, Japanese exporters switched gears to nurture a new market in the United States. In the new model that Makimura proposes, silk is predominant over other export commodities like marine products, cotton, tea, and coal. American money flowed into eastern Japan (via Yokohama) from the silk trade, yielding a Kantō-centric economic geography and balancing Japan's trade with the outside world. As a result, Japan's economy was able to shift away from a “Chinese and Indian” pattern of trade in raw materials toward the export of manufactured goods (Makimura, p. 216).

As these brief summaries show, the two books are structured in radically different ways in spite of the similarity of their subject matter. The same can be said of their expected readership. On the one hand, The Merchant's Tale is exceedingly accessible and rich in human detail. It is appropriate for general readers and undergraduate students of all levels. On the other hand, Yokohama and the Silk Trade is a precisely argued historiographical intervention. It is aimed at scholars or graduate students of early-modern or modern Japanese history—namely, those who need no introduction to figures like Arai Hakuseki or Yanagita Kunio.

Reading the two works in conjunction, moreover, allows us to appreciate the significance of scale in historical analysis. Their emphasis on the local illustrates how country-scale generalizations obscure many of the actual processes taking place. But they each draw wider conclusions about Japan as a whole. Quite interestingly, they tie together these disparate scales of analysis in different ways. Makimura follows the exchange of a particular set of commodities from the villages to Yokohama, and then to the global market. Yokohama serves as a significant node in a network of international exchange and a focal point of the economy of eastern Japan. The approach is successful precisely because of the specificity of the analysis. Partner, on the other hand, juxtaposes the personal story of Chūemon in Yokohama with the big picture of national cultural transformation. In effect, the city serves as a synecdoche for both a modernizing Japan and an “aggressive and glamorous ‘other’” (Partner, p. 220). As a device to make these historical trends concrete, these juxtapositions are useful for a general reader. But extrapolating from Yokohama can be imprecise—for instance, it leads to a general neglect of the importance of the China trade elsewhere in Japan.Footnote ⁹ As a result, Partner's discussion of an emergent Japanese identity is more Eurocentric than it needs to be, since it ignores the importance of China in the worldview of Japanese at the time. To be fair, Makimura's work also focuses almost exclusively on Japan's relationship with Europe and America, but with regard to the silk trade this makes a good deal of sense.

There are many instances where the analyses offered by these two books diverge in illuminating and complementary ways. For instance, Makimura's account reveals how Chūemon's was only one piece of the larger puzzle of merchant activity in Yokohama. At the same time, Partner's account of his daily struggles and repeated failures to market everything from coal to socks enriches our understanding of what commerce was like at human scale. Likewise, the Meiji Restoration receives very different treatment in each book. In Chūemon's letters, we can perceive his anxiety regarding political upheaval; but shipments from Kōshū and Shinshū to Yokohama continued without interruption through these years. Partner thus makes the case that the commercialization of the Japanese hinterland continued across the divide of the Meiji Restoration with only minimal disruption (Partner, p. 162). From a wider remove, however, we can see that such commerce was altered fundamentally by the Restoration. Makimura argues that the abolition of internal political boundaries led to a unified national market under a centralized state; the Japanese economy then transitioned from a “crony capitalist” to a “capitalist” model (Makimura, p. 207).

Scale is also crucial to their assessment of the factors that led to Japan's economic success during these decades. Chūemon's story of resilience and ambition powerfully evokes the role of individuals in effecting historical change. As Partner puts it, Japan's integration into “global flows of goods and ideas” depended on “the efforts of countless small-scale entrepreneurs like Chūemon” (Partner, pp. 210–11). Makimura's study does not disagree. He concludes that during the Meiji era, “the story of early industrialization in Japan is primarily a story of private industry,” rather than the state-run silk filatures, cotton plants, steel mills, or coal mines (Makimura, p. 215). But his contextualization of the silk trade in progressively wider scales of analysis, from the village up to the global, focuses our attention on the crucial role of “lucky” international circumstances.

While the primary research questions are far from new, these new histories of commerce in Yokohama are still compelling. They provide a wealth of empirical detail and skilled analysis. The implicit economic arguments presented in the two books also resonate with the neoliberal politics of our time—and run counter to the anti-globalist populism of the moment. Japan was “forced open,” but the global market brought opportunity, rather than ruin. As the authors tell it, things turned out fine for Chūemon and his family in the end, as they did for Japan as a whole. They do not dwell on imperialist power relations, but choose to see international exchange as mutually beneficial, and capable of facilitating information exchange and infrastructural development. That message will surely find a receptive readership today and reinforce the perception of Japan as the premier case of modernization outside of the West.