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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how mountain resources and mineral extraction at Japanese mining sites such as Innai, Ikuno, and Iwami shaped the politics of movement and motion control central to the maintenance of Tokugawa authority.

Paper long abstract

The ability to control or make claims on movement was central to the exercise of authority in early modern Japan. Battles and alliances shifted territory, disappointment and betrayal displaced those who fell out of favor, and hostages served as guarantors of loyalty. Although many prominent daimyo are associated with particular places, Japan’s military elite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries formed the most mobile generation of leadership in the archipelago’s history. In contrast, mines boomed or busted, sometimes repeatedly, but they remained immobile. This paper centers mines as sites around which political actors orbited, rather than assets moving metaphorically between daimyo coffers. I trace the political biographies of a few prominent mines to conceptualize the understudied relationship between mineral extraction and the exercise of political power in Japan. History surveys often state that the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) captured the country’s mines, but circumstances were more complicated in practice. This paper explores that nuance by analyzing the trajectories of 1) precious metals mines such as Iwami and Ikuno that drew the Tokugawa into their orbit; 2) a silver mine (Innai) discovered and maintained by a Tokugawa rival; and 3) a mine (Hosokura) that passed through multiple cycles of exploitation before stabilizing as a lead production site under a Tokugawa ally. I hypothesize that the movement—of actors, authority, and expertise— required to exploit immobile mines featured as another important arena of “motion control” central to political leadership in the decades before and after the establishment of Tokugawa hegemony.