The Merchant's Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan by Simon Partner (review)

Shinohara Chūemon was 51 when he left his village in the province of Kai to become a merchant in Yokohama. As a rural entrepreneur (gōnō), he already had experience in commerce and in local administration. Even so, appealing to the shogunate for permission to open a store in a city that had yet to be built in order to conduct business with foreigners was a gamble. Although Chūemon's exact motivation remains unknown, Simon Partner emphasizes a risk-taking mentality that led him into one business venture after another. Partner sees this willingness to seize new opportunities as characterizing many of the men who went to Yokohama in the pursuit of profit and new ideas.

Yokohama has long loomed large in the history of modern Japan. Some of the Westerners who flocked there in search of fortune kept journals that have been published. Everyone who studies Japan's opening to the West and the treaty port system in particular deals with Yokohama. Its role in the opening of Japan to foreign commerce thus constitutes an oft-told tale, but Partner provides new nuance through his attempt to paint a picture of daily life in the city from the point of view of an ordinary Japanese merchant. Chūemon had his successes and failures, each of which serves to illuminate changes in global demand for Japanese products, the technologies of trade, and the character of information networks. In Partner's eyes, these had a greater impact on ordinary Japanese people and on Japan's future than many of the policies inaugurated by statesmen.

I am sympathetic to Partner's desire to center individuals such as Chūemon in historical accounts because examining the choices and the experiences of people like him provides compelling illustrations of social transformations. When Japanese historians turned away from Marxism to pursue people's history (minshū shi), they argued that commoners made a greater contribution to economic progress and social change than samurai not only because there were more of them but because they had a well-developed sense of conventional morality (tsūzoku dōtoku) that structured their actions. Although Partner does not discuss Chūemon's moral code, it can be seen in his work ethic and his trustworthiness. His backers and business partners lived in Kai where he could communicate with them only through letters sent to his son, yet even though he often had to postpone paying off his debts at year's end, they trusted him enough to keep extending credit to him. Without this degree of mutual confidence, even the strictest contracts would not have sufficed to guarantee the shipment of goods to Yokohama. In the course of his dealings with multiple partners, Chūemon got burned by a fellow Japanese only once—a remarkable testimony to the strength of the social bonds at that time.

Partner derives his time frame for this study from Chūemon's arrival in Yokohama in 1859 to the last letter he wrote to his son in 1873. One of the pleasures of doing history is reading other people's mail, and Partner makes the most of his opportunity. Many of the letters pertain strictly to business, especially in the early years when Chūemon was struggling to raise capital and to find products that would appeal to foreigners. Would they like dried grapes? Alas, no. They liked to keep their houses warm, so they needed a plentiful supply of charcoal, but not in the summer months when a large shipment that Chūemon had commissioned finally arrived. When a blockade of southern ports during the American Civil War prevented textile factories in England from getting the supplies of cotton they had heretofore relied on, Chūemon manfully strove to fill the gap with cotton from Kai. Factory owners preferred the cotton with longer fiber that they could get...