The Geopolitical Context

By the late sixteenth century, China had emerged as the lucrative global “sink” for silver on account of the commercialization and monetization of its domestic economy and the desirability of its luxuries. Meanwhile, mines containing ample bullion to pay for these imports were discovered in Japan. However, Ming prohibitions (haijin 海禁) on private overseas trade and travel and the intensification of warfare in Japan among ambitious regional lords, or daimyo, to unify the country made regularized exchange between the complementary economies highly difficult. Armed bands of smugglers, primarily consisting of Chinese from the resource-deficient coastal provinces of Fujian, Guangdong 廣東, and Zhejiang 浙江, but also significant numbers of Japanese, Okinawans, Portuguese, and Southeast Asians, conducted a profitable illegal trade. They operated out of safe havens in Hirado and other ports along the Kyushu littoral under the protection of regional daimyo. They also collaborated with pirates in Japan, whose bands roamed the inland waterways, selling protection passes in exchange for tolls and often providing naval assistance to daimyo on a for-hire basis. The most successful among them acquired the trappings of land-based legitimacy as minor lords or members of the samurai warrior class (Chin Reference Chin and Antony2010; Shapinsky Reference Shapinsky and Antony2010).

Piratical attacks on the Chinese coast abated after the Ming court relaxed the maritime prohibitions in 1567 and opened Haicheng 海澄, in southern Fujian's Zhangzhou 漳州 Prefecture, as the sole port for private overseas trade. However, the court maintained its prohibition on direct trade and travel between China and Japan. Soon, other state and nonstate players entered the game to offer ways around the continued ban. In 1557, the Portuguese received the permission of the Guangdong provincial authorities to establish a foothold in the tiny enclave of Macao. On the Japanese end, they acquired Nagasaki from a minor Kyushu daimyo in 1571. By providing a legal conduit of exchange between the two ports, the Portuguese acquired vast fortunes. Not to be left behind, the Spanish seized Manila the same year and enticed Chinese traders to their colonial settlement by sending New World silver from Acapulco aboard a trans-Pacific galleon (Brook Reference Brook2008, 64, 152–84; Ptak Reference Ptak1998, 295–300).

Japan, too, entered the game after the country's unification under Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豐臣秀吉 (1536–98). The new ruler placed Nagasaki under central control and issued permits stamped with his vermillion seal (shuin 朱印) to select merchants, foreigners, and daimyo. The policies continued after the Tokugawa established hegemony over Japan in 1600. Shuin vessels traveled to ports across Southeast Asia, trading with Chinese merchants and native rulers, and spawning the growth of sizable overseas Japanese communities across the region. However, the most popular destination was Taiwan, just 70 kilometers off the southeastern Chinese littoral and primarily inhabited, at the time, by Malayo-Polynesian aborigines. Shuin merchants carried on a flourishing smuggling operation with traders and pirates from Fujian, on the other shore, who, in turn, illicitly colluded with private mercenary forces organized by the provincial authorities, ironically, for the very purpose of suppressing these activities (Cheng Reference Cheng2013, 19–24).

Zheng Zhilong came of age in this cosmopolitan yet lawless and stateless maritime world. Born in the seaside village of Shijing 石井, in southern Fujian's Quanzhou 泉州 Prefecture, he spent time in Macao before settling in Hirado. There, he secured a powerful patron in Li Dan 李旦 (d. 1625), a shuin merchant in the service of the local daimyo, Matsuura Takanobu 松浦隆信 II (1591–1637). While resident at the port, Zheng married Tagawa Matsu 田川マツ, daughter of one of Takanobu's ashigaru 足輕, or low-ranking samurai retainers. She gave birth to his eldest son, Koxinga, in 1624 (Andrade Reference Andrade2011, 62; Boxer Reference Boxer1941, 402–3).

Around this time, the entry of new powers into maritime East Asia upset the fragile regional balance. The English and Dutch East India Companies established trading posts, or factories, at Hirado in 1609. From there, they plundered Chinese junks on the Macao and Manila routes for goods to sell in Japan as a temporary measure while locating a permanent base along the Chinese coast able to compete with their Iberian counterparts. The English factory failed in this effort. Unable to generate long-term profits, it shut down in 1625. The Dutch had greater luck. A year earlier, with the assistance of Li Dan, they had founded a colony upon the smuggling emporium in southwestern Taiwan after tense negotiations with the Ming Fujian authorities. The Dutch East India Company would subsequently insert itself between the Chinese and Japanese smugglers, becoming the biggest middleman in the silk-for-silver exchange (Iwao Reference Iwao and Xianyao2001, 77–98).

Zheng Zhilong's star was rising as well. At Li's recommendation, he left behind his new wife and baby in Japan and sailed to Taiwan to serve the company as an interpreter of Portuguese. He had earlier acquired proficiency in this tongue, considered a lingua franca of the Asian sea lanes, during his residence in Macao. After Li's death in 1625, Zhilong won over most of the followers of his former patron and went into business for himself. From bases north of the Dutch settlement, he launched devastating raids upon the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong. To neutralize his threat, the Ming court, distracted by internal rebellion and the Manchu threat on its northeastern frontier, secured his surrender by appointing him to an official post in 1628. Within a decade, Zheng Zhilong used his new position of privilege to construct a massive fleet of commercial vessels that reaped splendid profits from overseas trade. As his career blossomed, he married again and took several concubines. However, he never forgot about his earlier union in Japan. At his request, his son, Koxinga, left Hirado to join him in Fujian in 1630. Zhilong had originally wanted his wife, Tagawa Matsu, to travel alongside Koxinga, but she decided instead to stay behind to take care of her younger son, Shichizaemon 七左衛門, then only two years of age (Kawaguchi Reference Kawaguchi1958, 5; Wong Reference Wong1981–83, 126–31).

Meanwhile, the Tokugawa shogun in Edo grew increasingly fearful of the threat posed to the legitimacy of their newly established regime from the Iberians and their aggressive promotion of Catholicism. The potential for Kyushu daimyo and adventurers in the Japantowns of Southeast Asia to forge independent power bases overseas posed a further challenge to the solidification of the bakufu's hegemony. During the 1630s, the shogun issued five edicts that proscribed Christianity, permanently expelled the Spanish and Portuguese, discontinued the shuin system, and forbade all subjects from leaving or returning to the country on pain of death. At the same time, the bakufu enacted measures to control and regulate both the suppliers of the luxury goods of maritime East Asia and domestic access to them. To this effect, it institutionalized diplomatic ties with the Ming vassal states of Ryukyu and Korea and utilized them as conduits to Chinese product sources. Starting in 1641, the bakufu also restricted all private trade to the port of Nagasaki, and restricted its participants to the Chinese and the Dutch East India Company (Totman Reference Totman1995, 113–16).

Adam Clulow's groundbreaking research has shed much light on relations between the bakufu and the Dutch East India Company. As he shows, an enterprise used to getting its own way elsewhere, readily resorting to violence to open markets and obtain commercial privileges, proved surprisingly meek before the Japanese authorities. The Dutch were forced to reside and do business in a cramped ghetto known as Deshima 出島, a small, manmade island lying at the entrance of Nagasaki Harbor. They could not enter the city proper or travel anywhere else in Japan except for a periodic visit to Edo for an audience with the shogun. The Dutch not only acquiesced to this treatment, but kept finding ways to ingratiate themselves before the bakufu as peaceful, apolitical merchants who separated their faith from their business, unlike the Catholic Iberians. The company's humility earned it access to the Japanese market, by then completely off-limits to all other European competitors. Over time, the Dutch became viewed less as proxies of a foreign power and more as domestic subjects of a small territory within the shogun's realm (Clulow Reference Clulow2009, 80–88; Reference Clulow2014, 112–13).

A similar domestication of the Chinese took place, but this process occurred much earlier than that of the Dutch, at the very beginning of the maritime prohibitions. Long-term Chinese residents of Nagasaki, consisting of some 30,000 people, became accepted as shogunal subjects. A small corps of Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks exercised an informal leadership through a network of temples that doubled as community centers. Although, unlike the Japanese, these residents could leave Japan, they did so at the expense of forfeiting their residency privileges and becoming indistinguishable from the more numerous merchants on temporary layover at the port. In practice, as Iioka Naoko shows, enforcement proved difficult, and the line between the two groups remained blurry. After all, the bakufu exhibited far less suspicion toward the Chinese, who, while more numerous than the Dutch, had no backing from their home government. Until the 1680s, they could come and leave at will, and roam freely within the municipal limits (Iioka Reference Iioka, Kayoko, Shiro and Reid2013, 237–41).

Beginning in the 1630s, a set of institutions arose to integrate these stateless subjects into the overall city structure. Two bakufu-appointed magistrates (bugyō 奉行) stood at the top of the urban hierarchy, with one serving in Nagasaki and the other at Edo in a regular pattern of rotation. They functioned almost as a surrogate governing authority for the Chinese residents and itinerant traders. Their office further evolved into a court of appeal for Chinese merchants when disputes arose with the Dutch over raids and confiscation of their commercial junks at sea (Clulow Reference Clulow2014, 181). A shogunal deputy (daikan 代官), of equal importance as the magistrates, served as a check on the activities of the two and supervised the foreign trade of the city. Both the Chinese traders entering port and the Japanese merchants buying and selling from them had to go through him (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1988, 267–68).

Underneath the Edo-appointed officials lay the municipal corporation, led by hereditary city elders (toshiyori 年寄), who enjoyed more local influence. The elders, in turn, oversaw the Chinese Interpreters’ Office (Tō tsūji kaisho 唐通事會所), charged with communicating the bakufu's policies to the Chinese traders and diaspora, and conveying their requests to the authorities. The interpreters themselves were Chinese residents of the city who had adopted Japanese names when they entered its service (Boxer Reference Boxer1988, 146–49).Footnote ² The Nagasaki urban institutions collectively domesticated the Chinese and organized them under a rationalized administration, transforming them into a counterweight to the Dutch and thereby ensuring Japan's access to foreign products at reasonable prices.

Zheng Zhilong: The Alliance Takes Shape

The new policies of maritime restriction presented a golden opportunity for Zheng Zhilong. By asserting control over southeastern China's entire overseas trade, he could obtain a stranglehold over sales to the Japanese market and emerge as the sole arbiter of the maritime East Asian sea lanes. To this effect, he synthesized the precedents set by both the multinational pirate bands of the sixteenth century and the Ming irregular forces organized to suppress them. Utilizing his land-based legitimacy as a Ming official and profits from his trade, he rooted out competing smuggling networks and converted the Fujian mercenary army into a private military able to enforce and expand his commercial interests. He set up toll barriers around the Penghu Islands, in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, demanding payment (baoshui 報水) of 3,000 taels of silver from passing junks. In exchange, his agents issued a pass that entitled each ship to the protection of his powerful navy. Of course, those caught without one were plundered (Blussé Reference Blussé and Vermeer1990, 259–60; Wills Reference Wills, Spence and Wills1979, 217).

In 1635, Zhilong reached an informal agreement with the Dutch whereby his merchants would sell silk exclusively at their colony at Taiwan. He would leave the Japan market for silk to the Dutch. In return, he could obtain from the company the latest European weapons and naval technology. However, in 1641, he put an end to this cooperative arrangement by selling a shipment of silk directly at Nagasaki, much to the company's chagrin (Blussé Reference Blussé1996, 64–67). From 1642 onward, the value of goods on board his personal junks bound for Nagasaki alone jumped to 300,000 taels (11,250 kilograms) of silver per year (Ishihara Reference Ishihara1944, 272–78). This figure does not include other private vessels that purchased his passes and his similarly lucrative ties to Southeast Asian ports. Not surprisingly, Zheng Zhilong soon became one of the richest moguls in the world, whose assets, valued at tens of millions of taels, rivaled entire nations. As a symbol of his importance and prosperity, he converted the seaside town of Anhai 安海, not far from Shijing, into a major port for international trade and built a splendid mansion overlooking the ocean to serve as his headquarters (Wong Reference Wong1981–83, 129).Footnote ³

However, Zhilong's actions cut deeply into the profits of the Dutch and the viability of Taiwan. The company's representatives at Deshima repeatedly requested the Nagasaki magistrates to allow its ships to plunder his junks at sea in revenge for his perceived betrayal. Despite their bitter complaints, the authorities adamantly ordered them, in the name of the shogun, to desist from harming Zhilong's vessels and those of all other Chinese or face a death sentence (Ishihara Reference Ishihara1944, 290). The magistrates’ firm stance on Zhilong's behalf marked the beginning of an alliance between the bakufu, whom they represented, and the Zheng family that would last for over half a century. The bakufu evidently saw cooperation with Zheng Zhilong as a means to more effectively regulate the Chinese community in conjunction with its own local institutions.

However, Zheng Zhilong's maritime dominance soon came under threat. In 1644, Manchu troops entered Beijing and swept across northern China. Ming officials scrambled to organize resistance movements against the invaders, gathering around several imperial relatives in the south. Zhilong himself installed a pretender, the Longwu 隆武 Emperor (b. 1598, r. 1645–46), on the throne at Fuzhou 福州, the provincial capital of Fujian (Boxer Reference Boxer1941, 437–38). While preparing to defend his home base, he sent two missions to Nagasaki—one in late 1645 and the other in early 1646—with the aim of securing armaments and samurai warriors. Japan was an ideal choice in this regard. On the one hand, it had been a leading exporter of mercenaries before the bakufu's ban on overseas travel. Both the European colonial authorities and the native rulers in Southeast Asia valued them for their bravery and ferocity (Clulow Reference Clulow2007). Zhilong himself maintained an entire division consisting of 1,000 Japanese mercenaries led by one of his brothers and fully armed with harquebuses (Sekisai, Reference Sekisain.d.).

Moreover, earlier in 1645, the bakufu had made an exception to its restrictions by granting Zhilong's petition for his wife, Tagawa Matsu, to reunite with him and Koxinga. She would leave behind her second son, Shichizaemon, now a teenager of fifteen years of age, at Nagasaki, where communications with the Chinese coast could be more readily maintained (Kawaguchi Reference Kawaguchi1958, 4). When the prohibitions first came into effect, the Japanese wives of Chinese merchants came under pressure to depart. Nonetheless, they could—and many did—choose to stay behind, unlike the forcible expulsion faced by the Japanese wives and mistresses of the Europeans, along with their interracial children (Laver Reference Laver2011, 148). However, over five years had passed since the enactment of the ban, and it was by no means certain that the bakufu would allow a Japanese subject to leave the country once the grace period had ended and the rules had been set in stone. Therefore, the decision to permit Tagawa Matsu to set sail for China must have greatly encouraged Zhilong. He probably felt confident that the Japanese authorities would bend the rules for him once more on the issue of military assistance because of his tremendous economic and political clout in maritime East Asia and his crucial importance for Japan's foreign trade.

The first mission Zhilong dispatched carried a letter from a subordinate, Zhou Hezhi 周鶴芝, who, like Zhilong, had once resided in Japan and cultivated close ties to bakufu officials and daimyo. The second mission represented Zhilong himself and forwarded his personal gifts and requests, targeted at all levels of the Japanese establishment, from the shogun in Edo and emperor at Kyoto to the magistrates at Nagasaki. In addition to military aid, the letter to the shogun pressed the ruler to authorize Koxinga's younger brother, Shichizaemon, to leave Japan and join Zhilong in China, along with “ten ladies-in-waiting and slaves” to serve his homesick wife. Zhilong further used the opportunity to update the bakufu on the status of his eldest son, boasting of the ranks and honors Koxinga had received as military commander in the service of the Longwu pretender.

The bakufu officially turned down the first request, citing the lack of formal ties between China and Japan. In response to the second mission, it returned Zhilong's gifts and questioned the envoy about his inappropriate use of language in his letters to refer to the emperor and shogun (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:11–25). In private, however, many in the ruling circles staunchly favored intervention. Serious deliberations ensued, and detailed plans were even drawn up for an invasion of the Chinese coastline and the mobilization of daimyo and samurai across western Japan (Ishihara Reference Ishihara1944, 31–48).

Further action was prevented only when news arrived at Nagasaki in December 1646 of the fall of Fuzhou three months earlier. Zhilong had fallen out with the Longwu pretender and abandoned him to negotiate with the rapidly advancing Manchus, attracted by their offer of three southeastern provinces in exchange for his surrender. As a result, he put up little resistance, allowing the invaders to swiftly occupy the province and capture and execute the pretender. While the talks were still ongoing, however, the Manchus betrayed Zhilong and carried him off to Beijing, where he lived as a hostage until his execution in 1661. His wife, Tagawa Matsu, who had refused to surrender, committed suicide (Kawaguchi Reference Kawaguchi1958, 20–21). For the next five years, a chaotic power struggle raged along the southeastern Chinese coast. Zheng relatives, subordinates, and other remnants of the Ming Fujian and Zhejiang bureaucracies who had refused to submit to the Qing competed with one another to inherit and control Zhilong's trade, especially with Japan.

Koxinga: The Alliance Deepens

Zheng Zhilong's eldest son, the half-Japanese Koxinga, was one contender. Soon after his father's captivity, he fled to the islands of Xiamen 廈門 and Jinmen 金門, in southern Fujian, where he established a base and raised the flag of resistance against the Qing. In 1647, to bolster his rather shaky position, he upheld the Ming pretender Yongli 永曆 (b. 1623, r. 1646–62) in southwestern China. By 1650, Koxinga had overcome his rivals, inherited his father's business network, and acquired a following among most of Zhilong's men and Ming provincial and national elites. As the decade progressed, the young man fashioned a formidable organization consisting of 85,000 men and 230 naval junks that controlled most of the Chinese coastline, from Chongming 崇明, near present-day Shanghai, to Huizhou 惠州, in central Guangdong Province (Struve Reference Struve1984, 116–17, 143, 185–86). Moreover, he acquired privileged access to the sources of Chinese goods, often located in Qing-held territory, which allowed him to recover his family's leading role in overseas trade (Taiwan Research Institute of Xiamen University and the China Number One Archives 1983, 82). The profits, in turn, funded his campaigns against the Manchus.

Koxinga could now capitalize upon the military and economic power of his organization to deepen the alliance with Japan begun under his father. He was the most ideal person for the job, having spent the first six years of his life in Hirado. Despite the brevity of his residence, Koxinga held nostalgic feelings for his country of birth, revealed both in letters to Tokugawa officials and poems dedicated to his brother and other overseas Chinese at Nagasaki (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:29, 45). The bakufu, on its part, viewed his bicultural background positively. His leadership of the biggest segment of Chinese merchants in maritime East Asia ensured that it had a reliable partner knowledgeable of Japanese practices and able to ensure their compliance with its regulations. Moreover, as commander of a Ming loyalist resistance, Koxinga appealed to genuine, widespread sympathy among Japanese for the embattled dynasty. After the Manchus entered Beijing, the bakufu favored “only those Chinese merchants under anti-[Qing] auspices” to trade at Nagasaki (Toby Reference Toby1991, 138–39).Footnote ⁴ It also relaxed its residential restrictions to provide a haven for Ming loyalist refugees fleeing disorder back home.

Accordingly, in 1651, Koxinga dispatched an envoy to Nagasaki with a letter addressed to the new shogun, Ietsuna 家綱 (b. 1637, r. 1651–80). Greatly pleased, the ruler agreed to establish a formal relationship, although its exact nature remained ambiguous, and perhaps purposefully so (E. Kang Reference Kang1997, 142–46).Footnote ⁵ Chinese narratives claim that Ietsuna agreed to a fictive uncle-nephew protocol (shengli 甥禮), a relationship based upon rough equality (tonghao 通好), with Koxinga as the more junior member (Jiang Reference Jiang1960, 123). However, this interpretation appeared to be only that of Koxinga. In fact, Zheng missions never visited Edo, nor, according to available sources, did the bakufu ever dispatch envoys to Koxinga's bases along the Chinese coast. Such reciprocity would have formed a basic element of diplomacy between equal polities (Robinson Reference Robinson2000, 110).Footnote ⁶ While Japanese accounts are silent on the bakufu's view, its actions toward Koxinga and Shichizaemon appeared to treat them as internal vassals charged with supervision over a stateless community. Indeed, the brothers were Japanese subjects by default because of their birth to a samurai mother. Yet, their lowly position in the domestic hierarchy as foot soldiers (ashigaru) meant that they could only deal with the bakufu as subordinates of the Nagasaki magistrates, who were usually of the standard-bearer (hatamoto 旗本) rank (Beasley Reference Beasley2000, 155).

Thus, the relationship that took shape between the Zheng organization and Japan was neither entirely foreign nor domestic but had the qualities of both. As one Zheng official later put it, “the ties between us are like those of one family” and “the subjects of Japan are like our subjects” (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Kang1958–59, 1:73). This ambiguity gave Koxinga a free hand on the China-Japan trade route, to the great benefit of himself and his network, other Chinese merchants, and the authorities at Edo and Nagasaki. Altogether, Chinese traders, almost all of them agents or affiliates of Koxinga, exported goods worth 1,736,954 taels (65,135.8 kilograms) of silver over the thirteen-year period between 1650 and 1662, some 2.5 times that of the Dutch East India Company (Hayashi Akira Reference Hayashi1912–13, 4:325–28; Yamawaki Reference Yamawaki1976, 111).Footnote ⁷ His business received a further boost in 1655, when the bakufu abolished the five-decade-old silk allotment guild (itowappu 絲割符), which had restricted silk purchases to a small consortium of Japanese merchants. In its place, direct, competitive buying was introduced to anyone who could pay (aitai shōbai 相對商賣). Since the Dutch and Chinese were the only foreigners allowed to operate in Japan, both could set prices at will to realize even greater returns than before (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1988, 267–68).

Besides the authorities in Edo, Koxinga placed two of his most trusted confidants in charge of managing ties with all levels of the Nagasaki hierarchy. On the Japanese end, Shichizaemon served as head agent and ambassador at the port. His residence in the Motohakatachō 本博多町 district hosted visiting Zheng traders and doubled as a guildhall and silk exchange, where Chinese and Japanese merchants socialized and made deals (Ehara Reference Ehara1973, 44). Shichizaemon further handled the sale of trading permits to incoming private Chinese junks. They had to be renewed annually, and the proceeds forwarded to Koxinga. Shichizaemon deposited the passes at the office of the magistrates, where they could be picked up after the merchants presented a written proof of purchase issued by him when their ships first entered the port (Ōta Reference Ōta1928, 2:732). The magistrates assisted in enforcing payment. In 1653, when a ship owner named Wang Yunsheng 汪雲升 arrived at Nagasaki with a ten-year-old expired permit, they ordered the coastal garrison forces to detain him, confiscated the goods on his vessel, and handed him over to Zheng agents. Only through Shichizaemon's entreaties did Koxinga forgive this transgression (Ōta Reference Ōta1928, 2:733).Footnote ⁸ Others without Wang's luck faced bankruptcy and the organization's harsh punishments after returning to China.

The other figure in charge of relations with Nagasaki was Koxinga's elder clan brother, Zheng Tai 鄭泰 (d. 1663), who controlled the finances of the organization at Xiamen. A destitute bandit adopted by Zhilong, Tai acquired significant experience plying the sea routes to Japan aboard the family's vessels in his early years. He utilized his acumen and charming personality to forge a web of mercantile connections at Nagasaki (Borao Mateo et al. Reference Borao, Eugenio, Heyns, Gómez and Nisce2002, 2:618; Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:46; Yang Reference Yang1958, 88, 111). Tai cultivated warm ties with the city elders and Chinese interpreters underneath the centrally appointed authorities. His friendship and the organization's money, paid to them as bribes or gifts, made them powerful lobbyists for the Zheng family in front of the magistrates and bakufu (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:253). Moreover, the Chinese Interpreters’ Office became a bank where Tai stored silver each year on behalf of Koxinga and himself under separate accounts, named Tianhuang 天潢 and Dongli 東里, to serve as emergency funds and working capital. By 1662, Tai had entrusted 300,000 taels with the main interpreters (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:49; Historiographical Institute 1955, 1:92, 180).

These different levels of formal and personal connections formed the basis for a joint administration over Nagasaki's Chinese community. Koxinga's representatives worked through prominent Ming loyalists to keep the traders and residents in line and forge valuable contacts among Japanese elites and officials outside of the Zhengs’ immediate circle. Among them were the renowned Confucian scholar Zhu Shunshui 朱舜水 (1600–82); Li Feng 李鳳, a former military governor; and Lin Huanguan 林環官, leader of a loyalist militia. The Zheng organization also maintained cordial ties with Yinyuan 隱元 (J. Ingen, 1592–1673), the highly esteemed head abbot of Huangbo 黃檗 Temple in northeastern Fujian and transmitter of the Huangbo (J. Ōbaku) sect of Chan (Zen) Buddhism to Japan. In 1654, when the monk and twenty disciples set sail from China at the invitation of the Kōfukuji 興福寺 Temple in Nagasaki, Koxinga dispatched soldiers to travel alongside them on land and used his own ships to escort them to their destination (Tanabe Reference Tanabe1973, 255).

The successful assertion of Koxinga's influence at Nagasaki further blurred the lines between long-term Chinese residents and sojourning merchants. Under the protection of the Zheng naval vessels, the East China Sea became an open maritime zone where Chinese could trade and travel largely unimpeded. In fact, many prominent Ming refugees outfitted their own ships and plunged into the lucrative silk-for-silver exchange between Nagasaki and the China coast. Koxinga and, later, his son, Zheng Jing, would issue complementary permits to them on a yearly basis (Sŏng Reference Sŏng2007, 277_011b-12a).

Meanwhile, the bakufu continued to apply its domestic laws to protect the safety of Chinese shipping, a policy implicitly in favor of the Zheng organization. Koxinga cooperated by bringing all cases of predation upon his vessels, primarily undertaken by the Dutch East India Company, before the Nagasaki magistrates for adjudication. In one landmark case in June 1657, a Dutch ship, the Urk, plundered the junk of a Zheng agent named Chen Chenguan 陳軫官 en route to Japan from Johor, on the tip of the Malay peninsula, and held the crew captive. When the Urk ran aground in the shallow waters outside Nagasaki, the Chinese made a daring, successful run. On August 23, the escapees arrived at the magistrates’ office to file a petition. Two months later, the bakufu ruled in their favor, ordering the Dutch East India Company to compensate them for their losses and warning it to desist from future predation on junks headed to Japan or face permanent expulsion. In a subsequent 1661 ruling, the bakufu further ordered the Dutch to compensate Chen for damages of over 20,000 taels of silver (Ehara Reference Ehara1973, 45–46; Tanabe Reference Tanabe1973, 217). This and other decisions set firm precedents that allowed Koxinga to brandish Japanese law to neutralize the Dutch anywhere in maritime East Asia, even as the bakufu's own reach extended beyond its immediate waters (Cheng Reference Cheng2013, 186; Clulow Reference Clulow2014, 171–202).Footnote ⁹

Since the bakufu protected Koxinga under its laws, its maritime prohibitions naturally did not apply to his organization. It could legitimately authorize military aid for his war effort against the Manchus. In fact, the majority of nonsilver items on the return cargo of Zheng ships consisted of weapons and strategic materials whose export abroad was otherwise illegal. They included Japanese knives and swords, armor, muskets, cannons, and the iron to forge them at home. Moreover, tar and resin formed essential ingredients in the construction of naval junks. Copper was used to cast Yongli-era coins that circulated in the areas under Koxinga's control (Chen Reference Chen1991, 92; Hayashi Akira Reference Hayashi1912–13, 4:325–28; Jiang Reference Jiang1960, 190).

With the influx of armaments, Koxinga created an entire division modeled after samurai units. Known as the Iron Men (Tieren 鐵人), they consisted of around 5,000 to 8,000 soldiers. Heavy armor decorated with intricate motifs covered their bodies and left only small openings for the eyes and mouth. During battle, each unit of the division, marked by a flag bearing a distinct animal, specialized in one weapon, reflecting Japanese forms of warfare. They performed capably during campaigns against the Manchus, striking fear into the enemies’ hearts with their terrifying and exotic appearance as much as their actual power (Ji Reference Ji1963, 331–32; Jiang Reference Jiang1960, 170).

Like his father, Koxinga additionally hoped to secure Japanese manpower for his forces. In 1647, before he had fully consolidated his position on the Chinese coast, he sent a mission to Nagasaki asking for “tens of thousands of warriors” (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:29). This exchange marked the first of a total of three petitions made by Koxinga to the bakufu on the matter. Patrizia Carioti and Huang Yuzhai have done groundbreaking research on all of the requests for samurai from Ming loyalists, including the Zheng family, between 1645 and 1692. They believe that although the bakufu seriously considered the appeals on many occasions, it decided, in each case, against intervention but usually avoided an official response (Carioti, Reference Carioti, Andrade and Hangforthcoming; Huang Reference Huang1958). Their opinion has achieved widespread scholarly consensus. Ishihara Michihiro, on the other hand, takes an opposing position. He believes that many samurai from Japan actually settled in China and joined Koxinga's ranks. Of course, his work, written in 1944, contains much speculation, which it uses quite explicitly to advance the agenda of Japanese expansion into East Asia (Ishihara Reference Ishihara1944, 57–60). Nonetheless, a close examination of primary sources yields fresh evidence that, while still not entirely conclusive, bolsters Ishihara's claim and complicates the excellent work of Huang and Carioti.

Aside from direct appeals to the bakufu, Koxinga actively attempted to recruit Japanese soldiers through less formal channels. In this effort, he secured the assistance of the Nagasaki-based Zhu Shunshui, whose neo-Confucian scholarship and ardent Ming loyalism earned him significant respect and influence among elite circles within the country. One of Koxinga's surviving letters to Zhu specifically instructed him to request “troops of any size from the daimyo of Japan” (Ishihara Reference Ishihara1944, 54). Main targets of persuasion included Mito 水戸, the domain northeast of Edo, and Satsuma 薩摩, southeast of Nagasaki, whose lords ranked among the most fervent proponents for intervention when Zheng Zhilong appealed for aid in 1646 (Shao Reference Shao1961, 97, 125). Zhu did not restrict his focus to Japan; he also embarked on an epic journey through Southeast Asia, home to a large population of Japanese diaspora (Xu Reference Xu2004, 95; Zhu Reference Zhu2004). His tireless lobbying allowed Koxinga to anticipate with confidence the imminent arrival of “troops from foreign countries like Japan and Cambodia to aid the cause of righteousness,” as he remarked in a 1653 letter to his imprisoned father, Zhilong (Yang Reference Yang1958, 43).

The actual effect of these appeals remains unknown. However, eyewitnesses from a 1649 Ryukyu mission and later authors of Nagasaki local gazetteers described entire expatriate Japanese communities on islands off the Fujian coast. They preserved the customs of their homeland, wearing kimonos and placing pine and bamboo decorations at their doorsteps to celebrate the New Year (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:32; Nishikawa Reference Nishikawa1926, 42–43). Still, these communities could have been present since before the enactment of the strict maritime prohibitions. Maybe Zhu Shunshui's efforts in Southeast Asia also played a role in bringing them there. Many of the Japanese diaspora, especially in Vietnam and Siam, were traders and mercenaries unable to return home once the ban took effect. They are documented to have taken up service with the Dutch East India Company. It is not inconceivable that they would similarly provide their martial and mercantile expertise to the Zheng (Wray Reference Wray, McCabe Baghdiantz, Harlaftis and Pepelasis Minoglou2005).

Korean documents reveal more tantalizing information that raises the possibility of Japanese traveling directly between the home islands and the China coast. These previously underutilized sources consist primarily of interviews conducted by Chosŏn officials with the crews of Chinese junks on Cheju 濟州, an island lying in the middle of the trading lanes of the East China Sea. Vessels bound for Nagasaki often washed onto its shores amid heavy storms. The Koreans harbored strong pro-Ming and anti-Manchu sentiments and treated crewmembers identified as Zheng partisans with great respect and admiration. However, because the Chosŏn court maintained official tributary relations with the Qing, it had no choice but to report their arrival to Beijing and extradite them across the Manchurian border, where certain death awaited (Sun Reference Sun2007).

In 1667, a junk under the Zheng agent Lin Yinguan 林寅官 ran aground on Cheju. In one exchange with local officials, he and his crewmembers claimed that “Koxinga had been borrowing troops from Japan for many years” (Sŏng Reference Sŏng2007, 277_022a-22b). They may have made such a claim simply to exaggerate the power of the Zheng organization and the Ming loyalist movement in a desperate attempt to turn Korea against the Qing and, in the process, save their own lives. However, another Zheng junk from Macao that washed onto the island in 1670 contained a crew that donned both Chinese and Japanese outfits (Wu Reference Wu1980, 9:3968).Footnote ¹⁰ This fact proves particularly surprising, because the ship was in transit to Nagasaki, where arriving vessels were subject to rigorous searches for goods and people found in violation of the maritime prohibitions (Laver Reference Laver2011, 70–71). It is thus hard to imagine that Japanese subjects could enter or leave the port without at least tacit approval from the bakufu or some influential local authority. It would also make little sense for the Chinese to pass themselves off as Japanese, since the latter's presence outside of the country remained strictly forbidden.

There are also indications that in 1658, when Koxinga formally approached the bakufu a second time for a massive influx of armaments and troops, he had his wish granted. The request came at a time when he was preparing for a major expedition to seize the Qing-held Chinese commercial heartland of the Yangzi River Delta, the source of silk and other luxury exports for the Japan market. In July 1658, a junk bearing his letter and lavish gifts arrived at Nagasaki along with a crew of 147 people. The magistrates then forwarded the items to Edo. According to the available Japanese narratives, the shogunal advisory body (rōjū 老中) carefully studied and deliberated over the request for two months. In the end, it decided not to respond and sent the presents and mission home in September (Ehara Reference Ehara1973, 44; Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:45).

Interviews by Cheju officials of Lin Yinguan's shipwrecked crewmembers, however, reveal a vastly different story. They claimed that “in the early summer of 1660, Japan raised a huge expeditionary force.” “Japan” here could refer to the bakufu, a coalition of daimyo, or individual samurai recruited by the Nagasaki-based Chinese exiles. The long-term Chinese residents of the city, they went on to assert, served as guides and manned the vessels. The ultimate goal was to attack Beijing by sea in coordination with Koxinga's northern expedition. Yet, severe tempests forced the succor fleet to turn back (Sŏng Reference Sŏng2007, 277_022a-22b). Even if such a force had been put together and the journey had been smooth, it would still have arrived too late to make a difference. In the summer of the previous year, 1659, Koxinga's northern campaign ended in disaster when Qing troops lifted his siege of the commercial center of Nanjing and pursued his forces back to Xiamen.

The testimony of the shipwrecked crewmembers alone did not constitute sufficient evidence for the dispatch of an expeditionary fleet from Japan. Given their hopeless circumstances, they certainly had the motivation to misrepresent or outright lie about the extent of Japanese support. However, one key Chinese account provides corroboration for their claims in its narration of Koxinga's third, and final, request. In the fall of 1660, Koxinga sent his military official, Zhang Guangqi 張光啟, to Japan to ask for samurai troops. According to the Unofficial Record of Taiwan, a private, or “wild,” history written by Jiang Risheng 江日昇, a Fujian gentry whose father once served in the Zheng organization, Zhang returned during the winter with a negative report. He claimed that the bakufu had rejected the request “because of the losses incurred during the previous military expedition,” and only granted aid in the form of armaments (Jiang Reference Jiang1960, 190). Although Jiang's narrative, written about fifty years after Koxinga's time, is the most comprehensive surviving account of the rise and fall of the Zheng family, it also contains many embellishments and exaggerations. Nonetheless, his claims of the bakufu's dispatch of soldiers receive a significant boost when read in conjunction with the testimony of the shipwrecked sailors.

In sum, sufficient evidence exists to tentatively establish that Japanese mercenaries and merchants traveled to the China coast from Japan in some capacity. It also appears that if the bakufu played a role, it usually occurred not as a matter of official policy but rather tacit and passive facilitation behind the scenes. This arrangement would allow the bakufu to maintain plausible deniability and avoid a firm, official commitment to a risky continental venture from which it may not be able to extricate itself (Ishihara Reference Ishihara1944, 39–40). On the other hand, a China plagued by warfare and chaos provided a safety valve for merchants and unemployed samurai (rōnin 浪人) at home made redundant with the coming of peace and maritime restrictions and who could otherwise seriously threaten bakufu rule (Totman Reference Totman1995, 126–28).Footnote ¹¹ Once abroad, they could play a much more positive role in defending and profiting from the lucrative silk-for-silver exchange. However, a more thorough examination of Tokugawa-era publications and, especially, unpublished archives would be necessary to definitively modify the scholarly consensus on the Ming loyalist requests for samurai assistance.

Zheng Jing: The Alliance Fractures

In 1661, pinned down in his resource-deficient island bases in southern Fujian, Koxinga turned his troops away from the Ming loyalist cause, and, instead, seized the Dutch colony of Taiwan after a nine-month siege. In the summer of the following year, as he set out to forge a new maritime kingdom on the island, Koxinga suddenly died at the age of thirty-eight. A bitter succession struggle soon engulfed the organization, pitting his eldest son and successor, Zheng Jing, against Zheng Tai, who oversaw its finances and the China-Japan trade. Jing emerged victorious and executed Tai, leading to the massive defections of his children and followers to the Qing. In 1664, the Qing, allied with the turncoats and the organization's Dutch enemies, dislodged the Zheng from Xiamen and other coastal bases and forced them to withdraw entirely to Taiwan (Wong Reference Wong1981–83, 139–53).

Zheng Jing's business, including his trade with Nagasaki, suffered from warfare and a brutal Qing removal of its coastal residents into the interior to deprive him of supplies and trading goods. By 1665, however, he had turned things around. He achieved agricultural self-sufficiency on Taiwan and restored the viability of his commercial network by operating smuggling outposts on the mainland coast in collusion with local bandits and pirates, as well as richly bribed Qing officials (Chang et al. Reference Chang, Farrington, Fu-San, Yung-Ho, Mi-Tsa, Hsi-Fu and Ka-in1995, 64; Ho Reference Ho2011; Jiang Reference Jiang1960, 239). Still, these developments led to a steep increase in the risks and costs of the China-Japan trade. A total of thirty-seven Chinese junks on average, a majority of them belonging to Zheng Jing, sailed to Nagasaki from 1663 to 1673, about half the number during Koxinga's days. Nonetheless, they managed to realize a trading value of 1,459,933 taels (54,747.5 kilograms) of silver, just 15 percent lower in revenues, and some 1.5 times that of the Dutch (Hayashi Akira Reference Hayashi1912–13, 4:325–28, 334–35; Tanabe Reference Tanabe1973, 256–57). The lower volumes and increased prices of Chinese products exacerbated an already steady depletion of the Japanese bullion mines amid the rise of domestic production and demand (Totman Reference Totman1995, 138).

Besides economic friction, the organization's turn away from Ming restoration and toward the creation of an overseas Chinese kingdom severely damaged its credibility in Japan and threatened to remove the ideological underpinnings for its alliance with the bakufu. By Zheng Jing's generation, the personal ties that his father once enjoyed with Japan were also starting to weaken. Despite being one-quarter Japanese, the son identified far more with the Middle Kingdom, the only cultural milieu he ever knew. The defection of Zheng Tai's followers, the segment of the organization that had the most personal contact with Nagasaki officials during the 1650s, increased this sense of alienation. Zheng Jing further became involved in an acrimonious dispute with Tai's descendants over the ownership of the 300,000 taels of silver deposited at the Chinese Interpreters’ Office. Both parties dispatched envoys each year to Nagasaki to plead their case (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:217–40; Historiographical Institute 1955, 1:14–20, 58). The intra-familial feuding sharply divided the Chinese community, with the interpreters backing Zheng Tai's claims to the money and Shichizaemon taking the side of his nephew Jing (Ōta Reference Ōta1928, 2:733–36).

As the 1660s progressed, Edo adopted measures aimed both at curbing Zheng influence over the Chinese at Nagasaki and cutting their profit margins to reduce the cost of imports and stem the bullion outflow. In 1664, it lifted a 1641 ban on the export of gold coins (koban 小判) and encouraged them as alternatives to silver. After a major fire in Edo in 1668 caused prices for building materials and necessities to soar, the bakufu forbade both Chinese and Dutch merchants from carrying silver abroad altogether. The ban put Zheng traders at a sudden disadvantage, since gold enjoyed little demand in China.Footnote ¹² Facing heavy losses, they pressed for payment in silver and threatened to abandon the Japanese market. Under intense pressure, the bakufu finally allowed silver exports for the Chinese in 1671, although the law remained in effect for the Dutch (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1988, 266–70; Yamawaki Reference Yamawaki1976, 115).

Unfazed, the bakufu dropped its previously hostile attitude toward traders from Qing territory and began accommodating their junks to compete with Zheng Jing (Historiographical Institute 1955, 1:160–61; Ura Reference Ura and Yongxiang1955, 119). The bakufu also explicitly favored Tai by awarding the disputed silver reserves to his relatives (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:237–38; Xia Reference Xia1958, 48).Footnote ¹³ At the same time, it switched to a strictly neutral stance in disputes between the Zheng and the Dutch East India Company (Historiographical Institute 1955, 1:173).Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, the most drastic move occurred in 1672, when the bakufu artificially raised the market price of silver and ended the system of open competitive bidding, restricting purchases again to a designated consortium of Japanese merchants. The new regulations (shihō shohō 市法商法) threatened to cut into the hefty profit margins enjoyed by the Dutch and the Zheng organization for over twenty years (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1988, 282–83). This and other policies signaled the bakufu's intention to assert greater control over the Chinese community.

Late in 1670, Zheng Jing reacted to the unfavorable new policies by plundering two ships from Ryukyu on their way to render tribute to the Qing (Rekidai hōan, n.d.). His action appeared calculated to insult the bakufu, for the kingdom served as a key conduit for goods and intelligence from the Asian continent to Japan (Toby Reference Toby1991, 142–50). Also targeted was Satsuma, Ryukyu's other overlord, which no doubt authorized the mission, tantamount for Zheng Jing to a betrayal of the domain's previous commitment to the anti-Qing cause. In 1672, the bakufu responded in kind, ordering Nagasaki authorities to apprehend the first Zheng ship arriving at port and confiscate its belongings as compensation to Ryukyu. When word of the seizure reached Taiwan, the infuriated ruler banned all junks from sailing to Japan and threatened to raid any that tried. He also had a shipwrecked Japanese sailor detained at a peasant home and forced to work as a slave in the fields (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:72–73). In 1674, as his navy enforced the blockade, Zheng Jing sent mediators to Japan to force concessions (Chang et al. Reference Chang, Farrington, Fu-San, Yung-Ho, Mi-Tsa, Hsi-Fu and Ka-in1995, 172).

At this point, however, events in China took a dramatic turn. The same year, a major rebellion broke out against the Qing led by three of its semi-autonomous provincial feudatories (Liu Reference Liu1994). As Manchu control over China came under unprecedented attack, Zheng Jing embraced again the cause of Ming loyalism, reestablishing his traditional family bases at Xiamen and other coastal outposts on the mainland in alliance with the rebels. He initially enjoyed tremendous success, both on the battlefield and in winning over hearts and minds (Wong Reference Wong1981–83, 157–66).

For the time being, the rift with the bakufu healed and the alliance was reaffirmed. In a major goodwill gesture, Zheng Jing repatriated the Japanese hostage to Nagasaki and ensured that the sailor was adequately supplied with silver and provisions on the way. The bakufu, eager to mend ties, took this face-saving opportunity to restitute to Zheng Jing the value of the cargo seized earlier, but he politely rejected and returned the sum. Armaments soon flowed to the China coast again to aid his war effort (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:73, 135; Jiang Reference Jiang1960, 267). A sizable community of Japanese merchants also emerged in the northern Taiwanese port of Jilong 基隆. According to Qing-era Taiwan gazetteers, an island outside the town, known as Fuzhou Street, became “a place for exchange between the Zheng and the Japanese” (Liushiqi and Fan Reference Liushiqi and Xian1961, 30). How many of them came directly from Japan, either from before or after the maritime ban, or from other parts of Asia remains unknown.

Another major consequence of Zheng Jing's involvement in the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories was a grand family reunion, as Zheng Tai's men eagerly rejoined the organization. Although Tai's sons remained under close Qing supervision in Beijing, they ordered their agents, Gong Chun 龔淳 and Huang Xiongguan 黃熊官, to collect the silver deposits in Nagasaki that the bakufu had awarded them and transfer the amount to Jing to signify the healing of past wounds (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:244–45). The submission of this crucial wing of the clan mended divisions among the Chinese at Nagasaki and allowed the organization to regain the services of seasoned merchants with experience and connections in the trade with Japan. Thus ended, to the satisfaction of nearly all parties involved, a bitter dispute that had dragged on for over a decade (Ōta Reference Ōta1928, 2:733–36).Footnote ¹⁵

Nagasaki: Caught in Between

In contrast to the days of Koxinga, the role of foreign trade declined in Japan as a whole because of the rise of domestic markets and import substitution amid the steady depletion of silver. On the other hand, the family's business remained crucial to the vibrancy of Nagasaki, whose economy drew its very sustenance off of foreign trade. As the interests of the bakufu and the Zheng organization diverged over the 1660s and 1670s, local authorities found themselves forced to walk an ever more delicate tightrope. On the one hand, they vigorously prosecuted minor violations to convince the bakufu that they were enforcing its directives to the letter. In a 1672 case, a Japanese laborer discovered a rather minuscule 30 monme 匁 (113 grams) of silver carelessly stashed inside a paper lantern while loading goods onto a vessel belonging to the Taiwan merchant Huang Wuguan 黃武官. As it turned out, the sum had not been reported to the authorities. After questioning, the officials discovered that the coins had fallen out of the pocket of Huang's crewmember the night before, after the man had drunk too much sake. Nonetheless, the magistrate confiscated the money and awarded it to the Japanese informant (Morinaga Reference Morinaga1977, 144).

The Nagasaki authorities also closely toed the official line in handling cases with major ramifications for foreign relations, over which the bakufu maintained strict supervision. For instance, on October 26, 1666, a Zheng vessel sailing on the open sea outside Nagasaki Harbor fired four rounds of shot from its onboard cannon in the direction of the Dutch trading post on Deshima. This brazen act not only threatened to precipitate an international crisis, but it also openly defied prohibitions against the possession of weapons in Japan. The magistrates immediately detained the shipmaster, Huang Huiguan 黃會官, and his crew and locked them in jail (Historiographical Institute 1955 1:74–77).

At the same time, however, the Nagasaki officials made sure that the Tokugawa laws did not fundamentally harm the interests of the Zheng organization. Even as the captives languished in jail, they received a personal visit from the powerful daikan, Suetsugu Heizō Shigetomo 末次平蔵茂朝, who enjoyed a position of equal importance as the magistrates in the local hierarchy. Due to his mediation, the crew not only received extra clothing and blankets and better food, but they could also unload and sell their cargo without interference. Less than a month later, on November 18, the magistrates responded affirmatively to petitions from the heads of four junks from Taiwan that had just arrived at port, and released the offending Chinese merchants.

Moreover, with the assistance of the city officials, Zheng traders could load their ships with silver at far more attractive rates than those mandated in the bakufu's 1672 provisions. To avoid drawing suspicion to these unusually large volumes, the magistrates had the cargo aboard the first two Zheng ships of the year transferred to four small boats that would sail for Kyoto and Osaka at separate times, thereby diluting the shipment. The Dutch complained bitterly that the magistrate “only cares for the Koxinga Chinese daily from afar.” As in Koxinga's days, they also “received the support of the translators and city elders, so that trading took place smoothly” (Cai Reference Cai2005, 58).

The Bakufu Triumphs

Although Zheng Jing scored significant victories in the early stages of the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories, his forces became overextended and encountered severe shortages on the resource-deficient southeastern coast. As the flames of rebellion were quelled elsewhere, the Qing launched successful counterattacks against his forces, while persuading his followers to defect en masse. By 1676, the tide had turned definitively against Zheng Jing. The ideological solidarity between him and Japan, which had been temporarily strengthened, unraveled again, this time for good, and went the way of mutual economic interests. The bakufu now took steps to set firm boundaries between itself and the Zheng organization, and Chinese and Japanese.

In March 1676, the Nagasaki daikan, Suetsugu Shigetomo, was revealed to have outfitted a junk to trade on his own behalf with China and Cambodia. Custom-built at a Taiwanese shipyard, maybe at Jilong, during the previous year, it was loaded with maps, knives, and other strategic materials. He had violated the bakufu's ban on direct Japanese participation in overseas trade and the export of armaments. Given his close ties to the Zheng organization and key position as a mediator between Chinese and Japanese merchants, Shigetomo had probably engaged in these illicit activities on previous occasions, and the bakufu maybe even turned a blind eye. This time, however, it ordered the confiscation of the ship upon arrival at Nagasaki and initiated a purge of the daikan's office. As punishment, Shigetomo and his entire family were exiled to the remote island of Iki 壹岐. Many of his retainers, who had taken part in the venture, were imprisoned or put to death (Tanabe Reference Tanabe1973, 345). Shigetomo's downfall served as a powerful message for the magistrates and the city corporation, the other chronic violators of the prohibitions, to limit their cooperation with the Zheng organization. In 1681, it required the Nagasaki authorities to report directly to the bakufu all income and expenditures, including the value of gifts to prevent the receipt of illicit bribes (Cai Reference Cai2005, 58).

As a result of the vigorous enforcement, an average of 25.2 Chinese junks from the China coast, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia visited Nagasaki per year between 1673 and 1683, over 11 fewer compared to the previous decade. Likewise, the annual value of exports realized by the Zheng and other Chinese traders at the port fell by almost 30 percent to 1,028,654 taels (38,574.5 kilograms) worth of silver (Cheng Reference Cheng2013, 241). Meanwhile, the days of the organization were numbered. In 1680, Zheng Jing and his commanders, after suffering crippling shortages of food and military provisions, abandoned Xiamen and other mainland coastal possessions, and fled back to Taiwan. Crushed and forlorn by his defeat, Jing died in the early winter of 1681 at thirty-nine. Taking advantage of an ensuing succession struggle, the Qing court launched a naval expedition against Taiwan and scored a resounding victory in an epic battle with their adversaries in the Taiwan Strait. Upon hearing the news of the Zheng fleet's destruction, Jing's son and successor, thirteen-year-old Keshuang 克塽 (1671–1707), lost the will to fight. Along with his civil and military officials, he surrendered unconditionally on September 1, 1683. Taiwan became formally a part of the Qing Empire (Wong Reference Wong1981–83, 160–87).

After the Zheng organization's fall, its institutionalized support for the Chinese at Nagasaki became nonexistent, allowing the bakufu to end the alliance and transform them into complete foreigners. In 1684, it restored the itowappu guild, artificially reducing the silver price of imports to unprecedented depths. Two years later, Edo ordered the Chinese deprived of their mobility and confined to a walled ghetto (Tōjin yashiki 唐人屋敷) in the middle of the city, similar to their Dutch counterparts at Deshima. The final act of consolidation came in 1715, with the promulgation of the New Regulations of the Shōtoku 正德 Period, which capped the silver value of imports at 600,000 taels (22,500 kilograms) per year, divided among seventy junks from different regions of China (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1988, 208–50; Totman Reference Totman1995, 144–45).Footnote ¹⁶ These series of regulations both reflected and intensified a gradual decline in the intra–East Asian triangular network centered upon the China-Japan exchange that had emerged in the sixteenth century. Chinese merchants now flocked to new markets in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Japan, on the other hand, turned toward the domestic substitution of former luxury imports (Totman Reference Totman1995, 147–48).

Conclusion and Significance

Ronald Toby's groundbreaking study argues that Chinese merchants at Nagasaki occupied the lowest rung of “barbarian” in the bakufu's hierarchy of partners. They ranked below Korea, which it dealt with on the basis of status parity, followed by Ryukyu and the organized commercial entity of the Dutch East India Company, regarded as subordinate vassals. Collectively, these diplomatic and commercial relations formed the bedrock of a Japanocentric alternative forged by the bakufu to counter the Qing tributary system of diplomacy in East Asia (Toby Reference Toby1991, 226). This depiction of the lowly status of the Chinese certainly holds true for the eighteenth century, when the system had reached its maturity, but it must be emphasized that it represented the outcome of a highly contingent and contested process.

In fact, during the seventeenth century, the Chinese community at Nagasaki enjoyed a far more privileged position compared to both later times and other foreigners. Initially, the city magistrates treated these stateless merchants as surrogate subjects and shouldered the task of protecting their ships and property from predation at sea, especially from their Dutch competitors, which readily resorted to violence in a bid for commercial domination. After the rise of Zheng Zhilong on the Fujian coast in the 1620s, the bakufu saw in him a dependable partner able to provide a large part of the goods Japan needed from China and the rest of maritime East Asia. His centralized leadership over Chinese merchants could further decrease its own supervision costs and counterbalance the menacing presence of the Dutch East India Company.

Under Zhilong's son, Koxinga, the shared economic interests solidified into a political and ideological alliance. His samurai background and commitment to Ming restoration won him widespread identification and moral support in Japan. As a result, an ambivalent space emerged between the port city and the China coast that was neither entirely foreign nor domestic. Besides lucrative trading privileges, Koxinga received the protection of the bakufu's laws, which he applied far beyond the shores of Japan with great effect against the Dutch. He also acquired significant military support in the form of weapons and strategic materials whose export was otherwise strictly prohibited. The bakufu may have gone as far as turning a blind eye to Japanese merchants traveling abroad to trade and even tacitly providing samurai to assist in the Zhengs’ war effort against the Manchus.

This mutually beneficial alliance began to unravel in the 1660s, as Japan's silver stocks dwindled, prompting the bakufu to take measures to lower its dependence upon the intra–East Asian luxury trade and encourage domestic handicraft production. At the same time, the Zheng organization's turn away from Ming loyalism and the development of Taiwan, along with the weakened personal ties with Zheng Jing, removed the moral and ideological basis of Japanese support. Although Jing's importance to Japan on the whole declined, he continued to enjoy tremendous local financial clout and political influence over Nagasaki. He still managed to hang on to his privileges through sanctions and illicit collusion with authorities at the port city.

Only with the Zheng family's surrender to the Qing in 1683 could the bakufu successfully alter the status quo. From the Japanese perspective, this final act in the drawn-out disintegration of the Ming marked the definitive end of an authentic “China.” In the words of Hayashi Shunsai 林春齋 (1618–88), a historian and Confucian scholar at the shogun's court writing in 1674, China had “transformed into a barbarian state” (Hayashi Shunsai Reference Hayashi1958–59, 1:1). The dynastic transition gave the bakufu a legitimate reason to set firm barriers toward traders from Qing territory through restrictions on mobility and export quotas. They were no longer representatives of a superior civilization worthy of emulation, but foreigners of the lowest kind, slaves who bore the shame of their subjugation outwardly in their shaven pates and long queues, imposed under the pain of death by their Manchu rulers.

The story of the bakufu's relationship with the Zheng family and, by extension, the Chinese community at Nagasaki further contributes to the reassessment of Japan's so-called national seclusion. Laver (Reference Laver2011) correctly notes that the maritime restrictions resulted from the bakufu's desire to impose ideological conformity over the country and eliminate potential challenges to its supremacy from daimyo and other local and foreign players. Its actions mirrored similar trends in the rest of East Asia during the late seventeenth century. Peter Perdue (Reference Perdue2005, 42) and David Kang (Reference Kang2011, 153) show, for instance, how the Qing sought to impose a regularized administration over the fluid frontiers of Inner Asia through campaigns against the Zunghar Mongols, Tibetans, and other nonstate actors. Ultimately, the bakufu's effort to monopolize power in Japan led to decreased contacts with the outside world at least in terms of foreign trade, as articulated by Totman (Reference Totman1995) and Wigen (Reference Wigen1995).

Nonetheless, in the process of doing so, the bakufu responded rationally and flexibly to changing domestic and international circumstances. Toby (Reference Toby1991), Etsuko Kang (Reference Kang1997), and Clulow (Reference Clulow2014) have convincingly argued that it continued to view foreign affairs and commerce with great interest in the first few decades after the enactment of maritime prohibitions, at a time when Japan possessed ample bullion and depended heavily upon Chinese products. As this article has shown, the bakufu bent its own regulations, blurring the very definition of “foreign,” to facilitate a mutually beneficial alliance with the Zheng family. Even when the need for such linkages decreased after the 1660s, the trajectory toward greater isolation had to negotiate and contest with entrenched beneficiaries of the previous period of openness. The authorities at Nagasaki employed willful deceit, purposeful misrepresentations, and illicit collusion with the Zheng organization to carve out a narrowing niche for themselves amid the increasingly inward turn.