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2 results

  • 5 - Foreign Relations and Coastal Defense under the Mature Tokugawa Regime

  • from Part I - The Character of the Early Modern State
  • Edited by David L. Howell, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    15 January 2024
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023, pp 159-183

  • Summary

    This chapter outlines how from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century a mature Tokugawa shogunate recast the Japanese realm’s structures of trade, diplomacy, and maritime defense. It details the ways in which the Tokugawa regime, despite being Japan’s central authority, could not act unilaterally but had to recognize the agency held by the Satsuma and Tsushima domains in their relations with foreign states. In addition, the chapter explains the monopolistic and market tools employed by the shogunate to control key sectors of Japan’s foreign trade. It also explores the broader Pacific contexts – notably a common desire among participants to limit the use of silver in trade with China – that shaped the Japanese state’s foreign trade. Finally, it details the diversity in imported products that emerged by the early nineteenth century, reflected in the variety of goods in demand by both male and female Japanese consumers.

  • 6 - The inseparable trinity: Japan's relations with China and Korea

  • Edited by John Whitney Hall, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Assisted by James L. McClain
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1991, pp 235-300

  • Summary

    The international order that ideally spanned East Asia when Japan was in the later Middle Ages of its history may be described as a tributary system, one in which outlying states were bound with real or fictional ties of allegiance to the "Central Country", China. The Japanese were assigned Ningpo in Chekiang Province as their port of entry into China. The Ming government made official purchases from the cargoes of the Japanese ships and also allowed the Japanese envoys and their accompaniment of merchants to carry on private trade with licensed Chinese brokers. From the 1420s, the Koreans began to develop an elaborate system of allotting the number of ships that could be licensed each year for trade by individual Japanese. In diplomatic relations, Tsushima continued to play a highly inventive role unhindered by higher authority for almost three decades.