Yokohama and the Silk Trade: How Eastern Japan Became the Primary Economic Region of Japan, 1843-1893

by Yasuhiro Makimura

Overview

This study provides a broad political and economic examination of the impact of the silk trade on nineteenth-century Japan. It analyzes the economic role of Japan’s eastern interior region and that of the port of Yokohama. It argues that the economic development in this period laid the foundations for Japan’s prewar industrial development in the late nineteenth century and was largely responsible for the integration of Japan into the global economy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498555593
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	06/15/2017
Series:	New Studies in Modern Japan
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Yasuhiro Makimura is associate professor of history at Iona College.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Early Modern Japanese Economy
Chapter 2: The Failure of the Tempō Reforms and the Opening of Yokohama
Chapter 3: The First Merchant of Yokohama
Chapter 4: Bakumatsu Japan’s Trade and Yokohama’s Place in that Trade
Chapter 5: Yokohama and its Hinterland
Chapter 6: The Producers of Eastern Japan

Editorial Reviews

Yokohama and the Silk Trade is an important study of the development of Japanese international trade and economic geography.. .. Yasuhiro Makimura’s contribution is to show through a wealth of primary and secondary Japanese sources and a multi-sited analysis how Japanese economic ascendancy was neither a predictable nor an inevitable outcome.

Monumenta Nipponica

Expertly utilizing diaries, letters, and other primary materials, Yasuhiro Makimura unravels here the ways in which Japanese merchants connected the hinterland with Yokohama and, from there, with the world market. By focusing on the critically important Japanese silk industry—on which we surprisingly have no full-length study in English—and by taking a novel regional approach, Makimura provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the start-up phase of Japan’s modern economic development.

Steven Ericson

Makimura’s attention to individual actors and the choices they faced is an effective tool for exploring the many contingencies that went into making the Japanese silk trade successful.. ..

American Historical Review

Yokohama and the Silk Trade is a rich and lively account of the political economy of foreign trade in Japan from the opening of the treaty ports to the early 1890s. Yasuhiro Makimura combines wonderful stories with a strong interpretive line in this important work. At its center is a series of lively portraits of entrepreneurs whose careful network building and wild speculations helped to integrate the economy of eastern Japan at a time of rapid and unpredictable change.

David L. Howell

Makimura makes a strong case for taking a regional approach in explaining bakufu decision making before and immediately after Japan’s opening and in tracing how the establishment of the international silk trade at Yokohama remade eastern Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century.. . This book deserves a wide audience and should be read by anyone interested in economic geography, the role of the domestic political economy in Japan’s opening, and the rise of eastern Japan’s fortunes through the Yokohama silk trade.

The Journal of Japanese Studies

The bakufu chose Yokohama, a tiny fishing village, as the place to negotiate with Commodore Perry in 1854, and built the port city of Yokohama in 1859. Treaties limited foreign trade to five open port cities, and Yokohama quickly became the pivot for raw silk exports of such high quality that Japanese raw silk came to dominate the global market. In this study, Yasuhiro Makimura vividly examines the drama of nineteenth-century Yokohama from various perspectives, including Japanese domestic politics, foreign policy, export trade, reinvestment, and technological development.

Yuzo Kato