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9 Poor but Not Pirates: The Tsushima Domain and Foreign Relations in Early Modern Japan Robert Hellyer Over the past few decades, historians have demonstrated that, during the Edo period (1603–1868), Japan pursued foreign relations policies very much in tune with its Asian neighbors. For one, Arano Yasunori has illustrated how Japanese leaders restricted overseas trade and the movement of foreign merchants, took measures to stamp out Christianity, and established diplomatic protocols in ways that mirrored those of their counterparts throughout East and Southeast Asia.1 Despite these similarities, by the early nineteenth century, Japan had in one respect become exceptional in Asia and, for that matter, in the world. It was free of maritime pirates, namely, individuals or groups who use violence or the threat of violence to commandeer shipping or to attack coastal settlements. In the decades after 1800, pirates infested the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and, as explored in other chapters in this volume, the coast of China to the Gulf of Tonkin, as well as the waters around Singapore. One would assume that maritime piracy would also have plagued Japan, a state with few coastal defenses and no navy. Yet, as I have noted elsewhere, official documents rarely mention piracy.2 A report of an incident in Japan’s Inland Sea in 1870, for example, provides the only direct reference to pirates in Japanese waters in the “Dai Nihon Ishin Shiryō Kōhon,” the most comprehensive collection of central and local government records chronicling events from 1846 to 1872, the unsettled period surrounding the Meiji Restoration of 1868.3 Others, such as Tsūkō ichiran zokushū, a five-volume compilation of all types of Japanese intercourse with foreigners in the first decades of the nineteenth century, also register no attacks by pirates in the nineteenth century on either coastal settlements or shipping.4 The absence of piracy is intriguing particularly given the long history of such activity in Japanese waters spanning the period from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries. As the chapters by Peter Shapinsky and Maria Grazia Petrucci show, sea-based, marginal groups used violence as one tool to carve out political and economic power and authority in the Inland Sea. In addition, James Chin 116 Robert Hellyer highlights the important role that Japanese merchants played in sixteenth-century transnational trading networks headed by Chinese who engaged in piracy and smuggling simultaneously. He notes that some of these “merchant-pirates,” based in Kyushu, developed ties with, among others, traders-cum-pirates from Satsuma, a feudal domain in the southern part of the island. In the seventeenth century, however, Satsuma turned away from piracy. Like other Japanese coastal provinces, Satsuma did not return to it, even as political turmoil and increased trade in the first half of the nineteenth century created an environment where pirates conceivably could have prospered (see Map 9.1). As I have argued elsewhere, Satsuma, instead, chose smuggling, establishing a broad network of domestic and overseas partners extending in the south from Ryukyu (present-day Okinawa prefecture), an island kingdom dominated by Satsuma during the Edo period, to Ezo (present-day Hokkaido), then the northern frontier of the Japanese state. Unlike pirates, who use violence to seize goods, smugglers try to circumvent established commercial channels, often with the help of others, thereby engaging in activities that violate state laws or restrictions, in this case, regulations imposed by Japan’s central authority, the Tokugawa shogunate (bakufu). At ports on the Japan Sea coast, Satsuma ships illicitly traded Ryukyu sugar and Satsuma goods for marine products, primarily kelp, sea cucumbers, and abalone, harvested in Ezo. In clandestine exchanges with Chinese ships that arrived on domain shores, Satsuma used these products to obtain Chinese and Southeast Asian pharmacopeia, in high demand on the Japanese home market.5 In sum, Satsuma leaders anticipated piracy by reducing the opportunities for individuals to extract goods from coastal shipping and settlements by force. They also incorporated into their burgeoning commercial network domestic and foreign groups that might otherwise have organized fishermen or coastal merchants into pirate bands to raid the Japanese coastline. In a broader sense, the case of Satsuma reveals first, the vigor of a Japanese domestic market that produced a range of goods which buoyed maritime trade. Second, it demonstrates the viability of JapaneseChinese trade in the early nineteenth century, particularly outside the long established trade center of Nagasaki in Kyushu.6 This chapter explores further the absence of piracy in late Edo period...

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