The American Merchant Experience in 19th Century Japan (review)

When Ulysses S. Grant recommended that the pro-Japanese journalist Edward H. House be named America's consul general in Yokohama in 1881, the Yokohama-based Japan Gazette sneered that "these are not times when the interests of foreigners in Japan... can be entrusted to a literary toady."¹ After reading Kevin Murphy's account of the Americans who populated Japan's treaty ports in that era, one understands why the Gazette editor was so frightened. House stood for everything the American (and British) businessmen in Japan opposed: Japanese control of its own commerce, open relationships between the foreigners and their Japanese hosts, and support for Japan's modernizing policies. He also called vigorously for revision of the unequal treaties that burdened Japan with heavy tariff limits and prevented it from trying troublemaking foreigners in its own courts.

The Millikin University historian's thesis is simple—and important: the unequal treaties, which provided the foundation for America's relations with Japan in the late 1800s, produced an isolated, insular American business community, a community more interested in maintaining comfortable lifestyles than in expanding trade opportunities. By the 1890s, when treaty revision at last doomed treaty-port life, the American merchants had no ability to cope with the changes. If Western officials had been worried in the 1850s that "the Japanese were attempting to create 'another Deshima,'" their fears had been "gravely misdirected." It was the American merchants themselves who struggled endlessly "to create that isolation" (p.193), the expatriate traders who "responded to the unknown by struggling to recreate the known with enormous exactitude" (p.12). As a result, rather than seizing new opportunities when the treaties changed, the community simply withered away.

Several features of Murphy's approach are troubling, particularly his omissions. He has a tendency, for example, to slight the Japanese context. Perhaps because he uses no Japanese-language sources, his work focuses overwhelmingly on the attitudes, lifestyles, and disputes of the Americans and other foreigners, with only occasional (and then very slight) attention to the Japanese developments that created the world in which the merchants operated. There is almost nothing, for example, about the complexities and energy of Japan's treaty revision efforts in the 1870s and 1880s, little sense of the identity and historical roles of many of the important actors whose names appear in the work (e.g., Joseph Heco, Itō Hirobumi, Basil Hall Chamberlain), no explanation of the complexity of the sonnō jōi ("revere the emperor, expel the barbarians") movement that made life so difficult for the merchants in the 1860s, little on the energy that Meiji government leaders brought to their modernity projects. The American Merchant Experience seems at times to suffer the same isolation from Japan's broader context that the trader community itself did.

Murphy's use of sources also is somewhat problematic. While he uses a rich mix of diplomatic sources and business archives (to the degree they are available), he ignores all of the treaty-port newspapers except the British-owned Japan Mail, which in some ways was the most middle-of-the-road, and thus least interesting, of the foreign weeklies. It is particularly puzzling that Murphy fails to look seriously at the Tokio Times, since that was the only American-owned paper in Japan during the 1870s and since it fought constantly with the other foreign journals, thus providing rich insights into those issues and attitudes that form the heart of his study. The work is plagued too by a number of specific but significant weaknesses: an uneven index that leaves out more than it includes, a failure to examine important, and directly relevant, secondary sources such as Jack Hammersmith's study of U.S. diplomats in Meiji Japan, ² and inadequate citation for the material in charts.

Despite these disappointments, American Merchant Experience makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the treaty ports and, more important, to the ways by which an aggressive...