Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the movements of a merchant family from Kyushu to illustrate the border crossings for the Japanese in the late nineteenth century, thereby bridging the historiographical gap between early modern trade network in East Asia and modern-era emigration within the Japanese empire.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the first two decades of modern Japan's overseas travels, legalised in 1866. The conventional historiography pays little attention to this period before moving on to the first official migration to Hawaii in 1885, though recent works have begun to revisit this by incorporating migration to Karafuto and Hokkaido (Shiode 2015). I offer another critique to this standard periodisation by tracing itinerant merchants across East Asian waters. Although they do not fit into the standard definition of migrants, their movements merit examination because they provided a pattern of circular movements that were later repeated by Japanese settler colonialists and migrant labourers.

This paper uses a case study of one family business called Tashiroya, a porcelain wholesaler from Arita in northern Kyushu, to illustrate the border crossings for the Japanese in the late nineteenth century. The Tashiro family set up stores and made extended stays in Chinese treaty ports and sold porcelain materials to China, Korea, and the Western world. They eventually disappeared from the East Asian market after failing to follow through a contract with the Korean court to export roof tiles for the Kyongbok palace. Using private records of the Tashiro family, the paper discusses how the boundaries in East Asia were negotiated between the governments and the border-crossing merchants. I argue that the activities of the likes of Tashiroya set a foundation for the ensuing and more long-term settlement of Japanese in China and Korea, most notably in such cities as Shanghai, Tianjin, Hong Kong, and Seoul, but also in the interior. Following the footsteps of the Tashiro family, therefore, allows us to connect the history of treaty port network and the Japanese migration in East Asia which has been told through the prism of colonialism and mimetic imperialism (Uchida 2011; Driscoll 2010), while supplementing the accounts for Japanese prostitutes in East and Southeast Asia (Yamazaki 1998; Warren 2003; Mihalopoulos 2011). The paper ultimately describes an overlooked aspect on the origins of Japanese migration, placing it in the continuum from the Tokugawa-era commercial links to the post-Meiji emigration driven by the logic of empire.