 Good evening everybody. A very warm welcome to tonight's lecture. I'm Helen McNaughton. I'm chair of the Japan Research Center here at SOAS and before I introduce our guest speaker I just want to in particular welcome our new SOAS students. It's the start of an academic year as you know and also welcome to our JRC visiting scholars as well. And I'd also like to say a few words of introduction about this lecture series itself and welcome some very special guests. As many of you will know the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute has supported the work of the Japan Research Center since 2008. So this year is our 11th annual Meiji Jingu lecture and it's always in our first week so it's always a wonderful highlight and start to our academic year. So in addition to supporting this lecture series they also fund annual postgraduate scholarships and our two scholarship recipients are sitting at the front here and they also fund research grants for JRC academic members as well. So not only do they support us in that way, in that very generous way, but they every year they come here from Tokyo from Meiji Jingu to visit to celebrate our research partnership. So it's a really lovely event. So I'd like you to extend a very warm welcome to Mr Sattel, director of the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research. So Mr Sattel has been director since 2012 and he joined the Institute after many years service within the Japanese Imperial household and he's accompanied by his colleague Mr Aoyama. Please welcome Mr Aoyama. So on behalf of the JRC I'd like to thank you once again for your very generous and ongoing support of Japanese Studies here at SOAS. So now I'd like to introduce our guest speaker for this evening. Simon Partner is Professor of History at Duke University in the US. He graduated from Cambridge University and he was a banker and a management consultant before completing his PhD history at Columbia in 97. His first book was a history of Japan's emerging consumer society in the 50s and subsequently his interest in history from the bottom up has led him to focus on the lives of previously unknown individuals in Japan. So farmers, workers, merchants and housewives and he has published four biographies based on his research including the recently published last year The Merchants Tale, Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan published by Columbia University Press. This year the Japan Research Center turns 40 years old so if you haven't done so already please come along please register to come along to our birthday party next Wednesday this time next week in this very lecture theatre. But as many of you will know this year 2018 also marks 150 years since the Meiji Restoration in Japan. So we felt that Simon's research on one merchant family's experience of the Meiji Restoration and the transformation of Japan would be very apt topic for this week's Meiji Jingu lecture. So please join me in welcoming Simon Partner to SOAS. Thank you so much Helen and many thanks to the Japan Research Center for inviting me here. I was very honored to come and delighted to be here and thanks also to the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute. Mr. Sato, very nice of you to make it possible. Sorry I'll miss the birthday party next week. So yeah my book is about a merchants experience. I'm going to try and tie it in a little bit more than I have in previous presentations to the Meiji Restoration itself and try and think about what this man's experiences might tell us about that event and how to interpret it. It is a very very meaningful and controversial event in Japanese history. One of the unusual features of Japan's modern history is its experience not one but two rebaths in 1945 when Japan's militarist and imperialist past was erased overnight as the nation embarked on a new era in pursuit of peace, prosperity and democracy and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 of which this year marks the 150th anniversary. The conventional narrative of the Meiji Restoration is that it marked a dramatic turning point in which Japan turned its back on centuries of feudalism and isolation and inaugurated a remarkable era of rapid modernization under the leadership of an extraordinary group of visionary reformers one might call them the great men of Meiji. Meiji himself being the newly modernized and empowered emperor who was rescued from ceremonial obscurity to occupy a new position as an enlightened European style monarch. Of course in both cases these narratives are simplistic and misleading although they have had a great deal of staying power. It turns out that some of the most interesting features of the transitions are not the transformation but the continuities between one era and the next. In this talk I am going to focus on transformation. However the transformations I'm going to discuss some of which were central to Japan's economic and social modernization had little or nothing to do with the Meiji Restoration itself and they helped recast the Meiji Restoration as just one moment in an ongoing process of radical transformation that began at least a decade before the Restoration. I'm going to tell this story of transformation through the eyes of one man who was an eyewitness to many of the dramatic events surrounding the Meiji Restoration and whose fortunes were closely tied to the unfolding political, social and economic upheavals of the 1860s and this is him. His name is Shinohara Chuemon. I'm going to call him Chuemon in this presentation. He's the dad over here on the right and he's here with his two of his sons, sorry three of his sons and two of his grandchildren. I'd love to talk more about this photo but I'm hoping one of you will ask in the question and answer if we have a chance. Chuemon was a prosperous farmer in a region known as Koshu. Today that's Yamanashi prefecture. He had a wife, at least six children and a well-established position as one of the leaders of his village. Koshu itself is a fertile basin just over the first mountain range from the Kanto plain on the coast of which sat Edo, today's Tokyo, the capital of the Shoguns. In Chuemon's day, Koshu was most famous for its grapes. Actually it still is today. Well known today for its wine as well as its peaches. The geography of this basin surrounded by mountains makes it particularly warm and suitable for fruit cultivation but in Chuemon's day it also produced tobacco, cotton and silk. This is actually Chuemon's land, farmed today by his great-great grandson, now planted with peach trees. And this is the house that Chuemon himself lived in. It's a sturdy farmhouse belonging to an affluent family. It still stands and the portrait I showed you just now is hanging back there in the living room. It's probably been there since the 1870s and here is Chuemon's great-great-grandson who very kindly spent some time with me one very hot afternoon a couple of years ago. In April 1859 at the age of 50, here is the Koshu Plain. You can see it's a kind of a table land here just over the mountains. Chuemon traveled on foot which was the only mode of transport at the time from Koshu to the brand new port town of Yokohama. He went to take advantage of what he saw as the opportunity of a lifetime to open a shop in Yokohama and trade with the foreigners who were to arrive in just three months. Chuemon was getting close to retirement age. He had deep roots in his community. He had an established position in his village. He had a successful family business, farming and trading locally. He had a large family. He had a very comfortable life. It says a lot about his optimism and entrepreneurial drive that he would turn his back on all that and indeed risk it all in what he must surely have recognized was a very uncertain venture. So a few words about Yokohama itself. In 1858 under intense pressure the Shogunate had signed a series of agreements opening Japan to a wide range of new diplomatic and trading relations with Britain, the US, France, Russia and other nations. The trade was to be restricted to certain designated locations of which Yokohama was to be the most prominent. The selection of Yokohama was a compromise in the face of intense opposition to the new treaties by conservative activists who believed rightly I think that opening Japan to foreign relations under the new treaties would compromise Japan's sovereignty and expose it to an even greater threat of imperialist aggression. The Shogunate felt it had no choice but to accept the foreign demands. I think it was wrong but in order to mitigate the potential harm it carefully selected a location for the new treaty port that would allow it to isolate the foreigners and to control their activities as much as was reasonably possible. In order to achieve this the authorities built a brand new town from scratch complete with comfortable residential quarters for the foreign community, a Japanese merchant community that would be ready for business on day one and a lavish entertainment district designed to head off the temptation for foreigners to wander into adjoining communities in search of the two things men in foreign ports were always in need of, sex and alcohol. The town was deliberately built on a lavish scale to produce at least an image of comfort and prosperity. Chuemon's shop was actually located see you can't see too well but right around here there's a force and right behind the force it was a very good location right in the central area of town because he was one of the first to set up a shop there. He was one of 70 Japanese merchants present in Yokohama at the opening of trade on July the 1st 1859. Chuemon started with very high hopes but there was some daunting barriers to the success that he dreamed of. His idea was to specialize in the produce of Koshu which his son and friends, his son was back in the home village would send him for his inventory but it turned out there was no demand among the foreigners for grapes, tobacco or any of the other products that he had in stock. What the foreigners wanted was silk. Koshu did produce silk but it was an extraordinarily expensive commodity. A single pack horse load, so you see one or two pack horses in that in that picture there, purchased in the producing region cost around 450 yur which was the the currency of the time about 900 dollars at the time in American dollars. After building his shop and residence Chuemon's entire remaining capital was only 20 yur there was no way he could afford to buy silk on his own account. He did manage to sell a consignment of silk on commission but then he ran into another problem the foreign buyer refused to pay him for the silk he had delivered. There was a huge amount of distrust between foreigners and Japanese. Communication was very difficult and not since neither spoke the other's language and if a dispute arose there was no effective judicial or mediation system. There was all sorts of shady dealing on all sides and it's not surprising that both the Japanese and foreigners came to see the others as thoroughly untrustworthy. Chuemon also struggled with a variety of other problems. His house burned down, had to be rebuilt at a great expense. The high local taxes were a drain on his resources. He sent for his 17 year old son to help him out in the business but the boy turned out to be incompetent doing far more harm than good. At one of his low points in mid-1860 we find Chuemon and his whole household lying sick in bed unable to open the shop which anyway had nothing in it to sell because Chuemon had no money. So dire were his circumstances that he was forced to pawn all his wife's kimonos just to cover basic expenses for another month or two and this is a man who had left behind a very comfortable lifestyle and then borrowed against it all to open this shop and yet in spite of all the obstacles Chuemon remained optimistic. It's one of the most appealing features about his personality in fact. He never seems to give up and he did eventually succeed in developing a profitable business. The first opportunity came in the trade of cotton. This was a much cheaper commodity than silk and it was a product of the Koshu region. Indeed Chuemon himself was a producer and had some experience in the local cotton trade. Cotton had not been an item in demand by the foreigners but that changed in 1862. As the American civil war intensified the northern states blockaded the southern ports preventing the shipment of raw cotton from the plantations. The American south was by far the biggest supplier of cotton to the Lancashire mills which now had to look for alternative sources of supply. Chuemon observed the market for cotton strengthening in 1862 and demand continued to build over the following months. With the 1863 harvest Chuemon seized the opportunity. It was his first big success. He did very well through the second half of 1863 buying raw cotton in Koshu and selling it to the foreign merchants in Yokohama. The key to his success was the information advantage that Chuemon had over the local market. He knew the latest Yokohama prices and if he could act quickly enough he could trade before the local market caught on. He did everything he could to preserve this advantage. One method he used was to use the very fastest available means of communication. In practice this meant hiring couriers to run up and down the Yokohama Koshu Highway as fast as they could. The couriers had scheduled services that ran up and down the highway in relays taking three days to cover the 115 kilometer distance over the mountains to Koshu. But when he was really in a hurry Chuemon hired special couriers who were willing to run non-stop the entire distance making the journey in less than 24 hours. This service was very expensive as well it should be. Chuemon had to instruct his son to give the exhausted couriers a bed for a couple of nights to rest their sore legs but he was able to get his message to his son quickly giving the son time to buy before the local market caught on to the price rises in Yokohama. The other benefit of this speedy communication was it allowed Chuemon to turn over his merchandise more frequently. He was always stretched to the limit financially and the sooner he could bring merchandise back to Yokohama and turn it around the sooner he could reinvest in another purchase and the more overall purchases he could make over the course of the season. Chuemon also made use of strategic misinformation. Sometimes he would send two letters to his son with the courier one for his son to read privately the other that the son was to surreptitiously leak to the local merchants the private letter informed his son of the actual market conditions the leaked letter on the other hand painted a darker picture of the Yokohama market encouraging its readers to sell at a lower price. The cotton boom only lasted one season but it provided the resources for Chuemon to set his business on a sound of footing and a year or so later another opportunity presented itself once again the origin was far distant over the previous decade over the previous decade the european silk industry had been decimated by a devastating blight affecting silkworms across the continent. By the mid 1860s the europeans were desperate for new stock to rebuild their businesses as it happened Japan had a highly developed trade in silkworm eggs which merchants have discovered how to preserve on sheets of Japanese paper from mid 1865 Japan began exporting silkworm egg cards to europe so this is what they look like they would be uh the eggs would be laid in here and then transferred onto this card and when you get the card wet they sort of come back to life um the demand was intense and Chuemon was in the market from the beginning. This was not actually a product that Koshu specialized in and although Chuemon tried his hand at stimulating production of silkworm egg cards in his home province before long he found himself and his agents raging far and wide across central and northern Japan in search of inventory. There was in fact a mad scramble for the cards all across Europe or all across excuse me across Japan. The foreign demand was virtually limitless and the prices went up and up as the foreigners competed for available stocks. This was the business that really made Chuemon's fortune. So I'll come back to Chuemon's business but first I want to talk a little bit about his experience of the events leading up to the Meiji restoration and the restoration itself and its aftermath. As I mentioned earlier the opening of Yokohama was the first in a chain of events leading ultimately to the collapse of the shogunate. Indeed throughout the 1860s Yokohama was a major site of opposition and conflict both between the shogunate and its opponents and between the shogunate and the foreign treaty powers. Chuemon himself was not a political animal. He comments very little in his letters about political affairs but it's clear that he was a loyal subject of the shogun. He grew up in a prosperous region that had always benefited from shogunal patronage and indeed he himself had worked in the shogunal administration for time when he was younger. Throughout his correspondence he never questioned the authority or legitimacy of the shogunate. As far as he was concerned Yokohama was not a place of political conflict but a place of opportunity to earn the wealth that he dreamed of. But politics intruded on the affairs of Yokohama whether Chuemon liked it or not. Many anti-foreign activists focused their outrage on the treaty ports where in their opinion the foreigners were arrogantly occupying Japanese territory and making outrageous demands on the shogunal government. As one samurai later described his feelings at the time I should have thought it an act of the highest virtue whatever were the consequences to cut down a foreigner and if more than one so much the better. Terrorist attacks in and around Yokohama began as soon as the port opened. The foreigners slept with pistols under their pillows. Even the Japanese merchants doing business with the foreigners were in danger. In 1863 which was the peak year of conflict more than two dozen Japanese merchants were murdered. One of them had his head displayed on a stake with a placard proclaiming that he and others like him quote have trafficked in silk, wax, oil, salt, tea in fact all the staples of the land in articles necessary for the use of the people of the country and sold them to foreigners for their own gain. The most dramatic act of anti-foreign terrorism was the murder in September 1862 of Charles Richardson a British merchant from Shanghai who was visiting his sister in Yokohama. Richardson was murdered by the samurai bodyguards of one of Japan's great feudal lords and their master was widely assumed to have been complicit in the attack. It led to strident demands for compensation and ultimately to the brink of outright war between Britain and its allies and the Shogunal government. If war were to break out it was widely assumed that all the foreigners remaining in Yokohama would be massacred and indeed as the British ultimatum approached the streets of Yokohama emptied out as foreigners and Japanese merchants closed their shops and fled to safe havens. Chouemon very bravely stuck it out right through the crisis. He never lost his faith in the future of the town. In fact his main concern was not so much to secure his own safety but to reassure his investors that Yokohama really wasn't such a bad place as the news made it sound. This was actually a hard sell. You should see the prosperity of this place he wrote in the middle of these problems. Even the government officials are marveling at it. Although the Richardson dispute was eventually settled without bloodshed Chouemon watched in growing alarm as the political situation in Japan continued to deteriorate through the 1860s. Finally in January 1868 he reported on an unbelievable event that had taken place in faraway Kyoto. He headed a letter he wrote to his family about this event transcription of a dream indicating his sense of complete disbelief. The event he was reporting on was the battle of Tobar Fushimi in which the Shogunal army was soundly defeated by an alliance of powerful clans from western Japan who then proceeded to march up the eastern seaboard towards Edo. This marked the collapse of the Tokugawa regime and the end of the 260-year-old Tokugawa Shogunate. Chouemon continued for a while to delude himself that everything would return to normal. The Shogun would defeat the western allies on their way up to Edo or the Shogun or another of the great lords would create an independent state out of the eastern half of Japan and life in Japan in Yokohama could go on as normal. But it was not to be. The western army continued its march up towards the Shogunal capital and on March the 31st 1868 they arrived in Yokohama itself. Chouemon watched in horror as the wild men of Satsuma who to Chouemon were barely Japanese at all began wandering into the streets of Yokohama. Today he wrote in a letter to his son many of them came to look at the foreigners houses. I don't understand their language all of the inns are keeping their doors closed the high-ranking people and even the merchants are not going out the ferry stopped running yesterday the people of Yokohama have stored supplies and evacuated their old people and children even now I'm making preparations to that effect. Not long after Edo itself capitulated to the rebels who now became the recognized government of Japan in an extraordinary reversal of fortune the Shogun whose family had ruled Japan for over 200 years was declared the rebel and sent into exile. The collapse of Edo was a traumatic moment for the loyal servants of the Shogunate whose lives were upended. In fact though Edo itself had been in decline for years even as Yokohama which was just a few miles down the coast grew during the 1860s into one of the most vibrant commercial centers of Japan the Shogunal capital was increasingly hollowed out by economic decline and political chaos. Tsuemon for whom Edo was like a second home wrote frequently of the deteriorating security situation and the rampant theft and robbery that plagued the city. After its fall the Shogunal retainer Katsu Kaishu wrote in his diary he was a bit more eloquent than Tsuemon which is why I'm quoting him. The once great castle is today overgrown with weeds its towers are crumbling and its enclosures have become a den for beggars and outcasts. At night thieves wander about and cut down the unfortunate. The aged are left to die in the streets and bands of young men gather in the outskirts of the city to pillage and plunder. Yet even as the world he had known all his life collapsed around his ears Tsuemon's business continued to prosper. The foreign demand for silk and silkworm egg cards remained very strong and trade in the port barely faltered. Even as armies were on the move throughout Japan and even in fact as a western army was marching through Koshu itself burning towns along the way the goods kept moving along the highway between Koshu and Yokohama. For the most part Tsuemon concentrated on his business in the years that followed. In fact his business reached its peak in the two years after the major restoration. When he did comment on the dramatic political changes that continue to sweep the country it was usually with a mixture of bemusement and concern. One has the sense that after the unbelievable overthrow of the Tokugawa system anything was possible and all Tsuemon could do was look on while he pursued his business. For example at one point he reported without apparent concern that quote Japan will be given to France. They say that the French flag is flying from Edo castle. The emperor left on the 23rd on a ship to go to Satsuma and from there he will go abroad. People are saying there is no doubt about this. Nevertheless Tsuemon was slowly learning the meaning of being a subject of the emperor and not of the shogun. He no longer wrote of the barbarous westerners recognizing instead the sovereignty of the emperor in whose name they were ruling. By the time that the emperor came to Yokohama in October 1872 to attend the opening of the new Yokohama to Tokyo railway line Tsuemon had thoroughly mastered the appropriate honorifics to refer to his august majesty. Tomorrow he wrote they will be hold a great ceremony which will be attended by the Son of Heaven. From now on we will be able to travel from here to Edo by railway. I too plan to try riding it. It will be so fast. Of course Tsuemon was also excited about the railway because it validated his long-standing faith in the prosperous future of Yokohama and indeed by the time the railway opened the Tokyo Yokohama Highway was already the most heavily traveled route in Japan. There was one area though where Tsuemon continued to express deep concern about the new government's reform program. That was the dizzying series of administrative reforms that were launched in the villages. Tsuemon remained deeply involved in the affairs of his village and by the early 1870s his son Shojiro had become village headman. In quick succession the government introduced ambitious new plans for land registration, the creation of new population registers, the creation of a military conscription system and the creation of new schools as part of a compulsory education system. At the same time the government launched over a dozen reorganizations of village administration many of them aimed at cost cutting with the result that more and more of the burden fell on the remaining village officials. The land registration just to take one example was an enormously burdensome project involving the surveying and productivity assessment of every plot of arable land in Japan. Tsuemon frequently lamented the endless round of reform measures. He worried that the secret purpose might actually be to redistribute the land to the members of the samurai class who in another reform faced the abolition of their hereditary status. But although Tsuemon expressed concern and frustration he recognized as he had throughout the decade that as a humble farmer and merchant he was powerless to affect the course of events. If possible he wrote, I wish they could just leave things as they were but since these are orders from on high there's nothing anyone can do. Unfortunately Tsuemon's prosperity was not to continue forever. As his wealth grew Tsuemon ever the optimistic risk taker rapidly diversified into new businesses. He opened a high class in for traveling Japanese merchants with beds for 60 guests and he applied for a license to operate as a foreign exchange broker and money lender. He also invested extensively in real estate. The cash expenses for these new ventures were enormous and Tsuemon borrowed large amounts to finance them. In addition he borrowed heavily to finance continued growth in his egg card business. The collapse of Tsuemon's business began once again with an event taking place thousands of miles away. An event that in itself probably would have meant nothing to Tsuemon. On September the 1st 1870 the French and Prussian armies faced off at Seidon for its decisive battle. The battle ended in a devastating defeat for the French. Within a month the Germans were at the gates of Paris which was placed on the siege. As the Parisians struggled to find enough food for bear survival the luxury good market of which Paris had been the global capital withered to nothing. It took a month for news of the battle to reach Yokohama but on the day that it did arrive the market for silk and silkworm egg cards fell into a steep decline eventually falling by 75 percent. Stuck with a huge inventory and massive debts Tsuemon was essentially bankrupt. He held on for a few more years trying his hand at different ventures to restore his fortunes but in the mid 1870s he gave up and retired to his home village where he lived out the rest of his days no doubt regaling his fellow villagers with lively stories of his past successes in the colorful treaty port. Tsuemon's letters home also end with his return to the village and for my purposes so this is story but before I finish I'd like to reflect a little on how Tsuemon's story might help us rethink the narrative of the Meiji Restoration. You might well ask how one man's story can possibly help anyone reinterpret great historical events over which historians have argued for decades. As Helen mentioned I've written a number of these biographies of otherwise obscure men and women and I often get asked this question and to tell you the truth reinterpreting history isn't really my main motivation in doing this work. I think there's a great deal of value in reconstructing these life stories for their own sake in bringing otherwise forgotten people back to life and helping readers experience history through the eyes not of those who made that history but of those who lived it but in fact I think that these micro histories of individual lives can be quite helpful in rethinking established historical narratives. Individual experience often doesn't coincide with the grand narratives of history and that disparity can be revealing. Actually in the case of Tsuemon's story as I worked on this book I came to understand that there are really two main protagonists Tsuemon himself of course but also the town of Yokohama with which Tsuemon shared his destiny from the beginning and which was a central player in every act of Tsuemon's story. What I'd like to suggest to you is that without diminishing the amazing program of reform initiated by the new leaders of Japan after the major restoration we can see from Tsuemon's story and that of Yokohama that radical transformation was already well underway by 1868 and that the drivers of change were not the political leaders but rather men and women like Tsuemon ordinary people in search of opportunity. The traditional narrative of the Meiji restoration sees the foreigners as a threat but for Tsuemon they were a once in a lifetime opportunity so much so that he left everything behind and risked it all for the sake of exploiting this opportunity and he wasn't alone. Countless Japanese merchants and farmers flocked to Yokohama some of them just to see the foreigners and their strange lifestyles to marvel at the wealth and prosperity of the new town and for many to share if they couldn't to see if they couldn't find a way to share in that new wealth. So magnetic was the attraction that the population of Yokohama grew from a few hundred in 1859 to over 50,000 by the middle of the 1860s even as the population of Edo the rulers of which remained hostile to foreign trade declined by half. Clearly the first great driver of change was the opening of Yokohama to the global market. When the Japanese government opened this tiny foothold for the global trading community it was I like to think like plugging in to a humming electrical grid I know it's a slightly anachronistic analogy but the effects were almost instantaneous and the current was a shocking to many and very hard to control. For Tsuemon and many others like him it represented a virtually limitless opportunity. In Tsuemon's case it enabled a man who had almost no capital and who had no particular experience or skill to set him apart beyond his fervent belief in the power of the global market to prosper beyond his dreams. Actually it was the men like Tsuemon who were the most successful in Yokohama. The established merchant elites were too cautious about the foreign trade and too anxious to preserve their existing privilege. As a result many of them didn't survive the collapse of the Tokugawa regime. The opportunity of the global market extended far beyond the Yokohama merchant community to embrace tens of thousands of small-scale producers of cotton plants mulberry silkworm cocoons and silkworm egg cards that's actually what this illustration is supposed to show rural people making silkworm cocoons. In Koshu for example shipments of silk increased by 420 percent by volume during the course of the 1860s bringing much needed cash income to marginal farmers throughout the silk producing regions of Japan. Prices increased too so it was really a tremendous windfall for people who were living pretty close to the edge many of them. But the powerful current of the global market also brought unprecedented disruption. The injection of huge new demand in an environment of limited supply brought a surge in the prices of key commodities. The inflation was compounded by the rapid drain of currency from Japan as foreign traders took advantage of currency discrepancies. For those unfixed incomes laborers artisans and samurai retainers for example the inflation ate cruelly into their standard of living and it's not surprising that the 1860s witnessed a period of unprecedented popular protests in both towns and villages as economically marginal people struggled to survive amidst the turmoil of the era. Yokohama itself was not just a place to buy and sell goods in the global marketplace. It was also a place to experience new ideas, new styles, new ways of thinking about the world. Anyone who visited Yokohama must surely have been changed by the experience whether it was philosophy, architecture, religion, military science, medicine, public administration, or race. Yokohama offered radical new ways of understanding the world. I like to think of the town as a sort of department store another probably inappropriate analogy almost everything it offered was ultimately for sale but you didn't have to buy you could also just browse and in the process you could learn how to become a participant in the global culture of modernity. To participate in the global marketplace was also to redraw your mental maps of time and space. I see that process at work in Choumon's experiences and in the broader reconfiguration of the Koshu landscape. For example the connection of Yokohama to the global market brought about a radical reorientation of the economic networks of the Kanto region. Koshu had traditionally been a major supplier to the prosperous Edel market but with the explosive growth of Yokohama and the concurrent decline of Edel these networks shifted. Koshu was no longer Edel's hinterland now Koshu was a supply center for Yokohama and beyond that for the global market. We can see this shift very clearly in the opportunities and crises of Choumon's business activities. The great opportunities that brought in prosperity developed thousands of miles from home and similarly the event that brought an end to that prosperity the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War was also a far distant event. Probably most small-scale producers and perhaps even Choumon himself did not fully understand the ways in which they had come to benefit from but also to be very vulnerable to far distant events over which they had no control and often no knowledge. But these new relationships to global space were to be decisive in the fortunes of countless families. On the other hand the major domestic events of the 1860s while they must have seen momentous at the time often had a relatively minor impact on the fortunes of those who were connected to the global network. For Choumon the major restoration one of them surely one of the most momentous events in Japanese history was certainly shocking and frightening but it actually affected him remarkably little. His business continued almost unchanged by the political turmoil at home and he continued to build his fortunes right across this historic dividing line. Anyone exposed to the currents of global modernity would also run into new concepts and technologies of time. In fact one of the material goods the Japanese observers in Yokohama were most fascinated by was the pocket watch which enabled its owners to make appointments and regulate their days down to the minute. In the case of Choumon we have seen how quickly he came to understand the vital importance of rapid communications to his business success. In his case the only resource he had access to in order to speed up his world was the swift feat of the professional couriers but as it happened Choumon was experiencing this imperative to speed at a time of unprecedented development in the technologies of transportation and communication with the rapid development of steamship services and the completion of the American Intercontinental Railway and the Suez Canal both of which opened in 1869. Global communications accelerated dramatically. At the beginning of the 1860s the journey from New York or London to Yokohama by sailing ship took upwards of four months. By the end of the decade you could make the journey in less than four weeks and sometimes much quicker than that. The global telegraph system also developed rapidly throughout the decade and by 1870 the western city of Nagasaki was already connected directly to London and New York via overseas via undersea cable connections. Within Japan even before the major restoration Japanese entrepreneurs had introduced regular steamship services between Edo and Yokohama and with the encouragement of eager businessmen Japanese investors developed inventors I'm sorry developed a new technology that was to become a staple of Asian transportation networks the hand-pulled rickshaw. All of these changes took place regardless of Japan's domestic politics but they have profound implications for Japan and its place in the world. I'll briefly touch in some other transformations that are visible in the stories of Choumon on Yokohama sometime before the major restoration. First the spread of new understandings of the human body. With the opening of Yokohama foreigners commented often and loudly on the propensity of Japanese workers and others to wander the streets in a state of virtual or complete nudity. The westerners found this shocking and it didn't take long for Japan's emerging elites to share their opinion. Before long new directives emerged to regulate nudity and clothing but on top of that the spread of foreign textiles and the presence of strangely dressed foreigners in the treaty ports quickly led to a reconception of clothing and fashion with western or hybrid styles spreading rapidly through Japan's cities. Choumon himself was a part of this process. He distributed foreign machine made cloth in his home province and after the collapse of his egg cart business among his new ventures he actually opened a tailor shop selling western style clothing to Japanese customers. Second new food tastes also spread out from Yokohama. In particular Japanese people began to think very differently about the consumption of meat which had been more or less taboo for most Japanese due to both environmental and religious considerations. With new perceptions of the health benefits and strengthening effects of meat consumption the residents of Yokohama and then beyond began experimenting with new ways of eating. When the Meiji emperor announced at the beginning of the 1870s that he enjoyed eating beef an official stamp of approval was added to a process that had already been underway for a decade. Third the 1860s brought new understandings of hygiene and public health. Yokohama was the site of Japan's first mass vaccination campaigns and also its first hospitals and again these were before the Meiji restoration and finally it's also worth pointing out that the transformations triggered by Japan's connection to the global market via its Yokohama node were not all one way but they were also to some extent reciprocal. In particular the sudden appearance of Japanese arts and crafts on the world market triggered a craze for Japanese aesthetics. This painting by James Whistler for example the princess from the land of Porcelain was completed in 1864 four years before the Meiji restoration. Indeed all of the transformations that I've described were well in motion years before the Meiji restoration and collectively they comprise a significant reconfiguration of Japan's economic, technological, social and cultural landscapes. Indeed they can legitimately be seen as a part of the engine of Japan's rapid rapid modernization in the second half of the 19th century and for the most part they were initiated and implemented not by the great men of Meiji but by the little men of the high street. Men like Tsuemon ever keen to enhance their wealth and material comfort. One could argue in fact that it is they who are the primary motive force of historical transformation. Thank you.