Nagasaki

Originally a fishing village in western Kyushu, Nagasaki became an important trading port with the arrival of the Jesuits and Portuguese traders in Japan in the 1550s. As a means of gaining favor in the trade, a local daimyo granted Nagasaki to the Jesuits in 1570. This move was later revoked in 1587 by Japan's unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598). When Hideyoshi authorized overseas voyages by Japanese ships starting in the early 1590s, trade through Nagasaki increased, but it also became subject to greater controls, which were exercised through the Nagasaki magistrate. These controls evolved as institutional precedents of the later seclusion edicts of the 1630s, which banned overseas travel and the return of Japanese abroad. By 1641 the Dutch, then the only Europeans specifically authorized to stay in Japan, were made to reside in Dejima, an artificial islet in Nagasaki harbor.

The principal cargoes handled at Nagasaki were silver exports to China and silk imports, mostly from China. Export restrictions, not entirely enforceable, were placed on silver as well as gold later in the seventeenth century, but by the early eighteenth century copper bound for the Chinese mint grew in volume. Overall, trade increased rapidly after the 1680s when China liberalized its trade. The number of Chinese ships coming to Japan increased until the 1710s when Japan imposed limits on the number of ships allowed to come to Nagasaki. The government also made more restrictive its silk-importing guild (itowappu) as the country moved toward an import-substitution policy. By this time, though, the Chinese quarters in Nagasaki had expanded to the point where it was ten times larger than the Dutch station on Dejima.

When Japan reopened trade with the West in the 1850s Nagasaki became a center of exchange for officials of British trading companies who brought in models of Western factories and weapons used in Japan's Restoration Wars of the 1860s. In general, though, at this time most of the country's trade was controlled through the Chinese who were still resident in Nagasaki. Through the early years of the Meiji period (1868–1912) Japanese traders now free to go abroad faced stiffer competition from the Nagasaki-based Chinese than they did from Westerners. Nagasaki itself became for a time the key port of embarkation for shipping routes to nearby Asian ports such as Shanghai, Inchon, and Vladivostok, and the port grew as trade expanded through the nineteenth century, though it was soon overtaken by Yokohama and Kobe as a major international port.

By the 1890s, however, Nagasaki's function as a port was superseded by its role as the key center of Japanese shipbuilding. The Nagasaki shipyard had originally been established by the Tokugawa Bakufu in the late 1850s. The Meiji government subsequently sold it to Mitsubishi in 1885. When large-scale government subsidies began in the late 1890s, Mitsubishi set about building standardsize, oceangoing vessels, and Nagasaki became a center of exchange for raw materials and manufacturing. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II landed far from the shipyard, which quickly recovered its prominence in the 1950s. Later, Nagasaki again became a key port in regional trade with Northeast Asia.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Canton System; Cargoes, Freight; Cargoes, Passenger; Chambers of Commerce; Coen, Jan Pieterszoon; Compradors; Containerization; East India Company, Dutch; EntrepÔt System; Ethnic Groups, Cantonese; Ethnic Groups, Fujianese; Factories; Free Ports; Harbors; Japan; Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (METI);Perry, Matthew;Port Cities;South China Sea;Women Traders of Southeast Asia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elisonas, Jurgis. "The Sixteenth-Century Unification." In The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4: Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Innes, Robert L. "The Door Ajar: Japan's Foreign Trade in the Seventeenth Century." Ph.D. diss. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1980.

Komachi, Noriko. "The Chinese in Meiji Japan and their Interaction with the Japanese before the Sino-Japanese War." In The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions, ed. Akira Iriye. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

William Wray