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Coins, Collections, and Curiosities: Valuing Foreign Objects in Medieval and Early Modern Japan
Organizer: Ethan Segal, Michigan State University
Chair and Discussant: David L. Howell, Princeton University
This panel examines the role of foreign material culture in medieval, late medieval, and early modern Japan. Of particular interest is the valence of the foreignness of imported things in the hierarchies of value in each of these periods. Why did objects from China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and later, Europe, resonate in Japanese economies of exchange? Who valued these things, and how were they represented in the documentary record? By seeking to answer these questions in three distinct periods in Japanese history, this panel will illuminate Japan's changing relationship with other cultures and the degree of its ostensible isolation. First, Ethan Segal analyzes the role and function of imported coins in medieval Japan. Although institutional history offers some insights into the advantages of metallic currency, Segal instead turns to the appeal of “things Chinese” in the Japanese marketplace to understand how currency obtained worth in the absence of an issuing state authority. In the second paper, Morgan Pitelka steals into the treasure house of Tokugawa Ieyasu to analyze the foreign objects held within. Pitelka looks at the value of these treasures as a visible manifestation of Ieyasu’s hegemonic view of Japan’s place in the world. The final paper moves from the elite to the everyday as Laura Nenzi explores a middle-ranked samurai’s journey to the foreign world of nineteenth-century Nagasaki. As Nenzi demonstrates, the relative value placed on Chinese and European goods reveals surprising trends in Japan’s view of the changing international scene. Together, the papers highlight how power, ideology, and consumption shaped Japan’s worldview between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Foreign Coins and Attitudes toward China in Medieval Japan
Ethan Segal, Michigan State University
Although individuals of many types, from Buddhist monks to Korean merchants, Mongol invaders to Japanese pirates, plied the waters between Japan and China during Japan’s medieval period, nothing compared numerically to the vast quantities of Chinese cash that crossed the sea to Japan. Medieval merchants brought such large amounts of copper coinage to Japan that Chinese officials complained of ports being emptied of coin overnight when boats bound for Japan arrived. Modern scholars have recognized the importance of this currency and its role in helping to monetize and expand Japan’s economy, but the reasons for using imported rather than domestic currency remain less-than-fully clear. This paper analyzes Japanese and Chinese primary sources in an effort to better explain the medieval trade in money and its function in the respective economies of China and Japan. It also uses Chinese cash as a window onto the state of “traditional” elite political and economic concerns. Why were Chinese coins so desirable in Japan? What role did copper content and the relative value (and availability) of different materials play in the Japanese turn to imported metallic money? Finally, and most importantly, how did its “Chinese-ness” help the currency become popular with medieval Japanese? Although some scholars have argued that Chinese authority and prestige helped convey value on copper coins even beyond China’s borders, the easy acceptance of imported currency at all levels of society in Japan challenges the simplicity of the foreign/domestic distinction.
The Collection of Tokugawa Ieyasu: A Late Medieval 'Empire of Things'
Morgan J. Pitelka, Occidental College
Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, is best known as the savvy warrior and strategic politician who created the Pax Tokugawa before arranging his own deification. He has also been idealized as a frugal and disciplined man, more interested in the martial arts and Confucianism than in the pleasures of the temporal world. Over the course of his lifetime, however, he amassed a massive collection of objects that reveals much about the regimes of value active in his age. The most numerous and symbolically significant objects collected by Ieyasu were those related to the primary occupation of the warrior status group, namely the arms, armor, and other military effects employed in the practice of warfare. He also amassed things related to pastimes including Noh theater, tea, incense connoisseurship, and falconry, as well as objects from his everyday life. This paper will read the collection of Ieyasu as a map of what James Clifford called “the predicaments of culture” of the warrior elite. Of particular interest for this panel are those objects imported from China, Korea, and Southeast Asia and the larger symbolic and social relationships they represent. I will argue that Ieyasu’s collection, as a material accretion of the cultural hierarchies of the day, illuminates the potent role that foreign objects played in struggles for social status, cultural capital, and political legitimacy in late medieval Japan.
Unidentified Foreign Objects: A Samurai in 1860 Nagasaki
Laura Nenzi, Florida International University, (please select)
In the nineteenth century, the city port of Nagasaki bustled with Chinese merchants and Dutch traders as a stream of foreign goods and knowledge trickled into the country. Since the seventeenth century, Nagasaki had become the convenient counterpart of a journey overseas for Japanese interested in the outside world or curious to experience ‘foreignness’ in one way or another but prevented from traveling abroad by the laws of the Tokugawa. Tangible objects in particular affected the impression that Japanese visitors had of the city and of its cosmopolitan culture. At times simply observed and described, at times actually acquired or exchanged, things foreign spoke to visitors, mediating and sanctifying the encounter between domestic and outlandish. This paper looks at the experience of an individual samurai, known as Kawai Tsugunosuke, who visited Nagasaki in 1860. Tsugunosuke came to the city at a particularly unique time in history – following the humiliation of China in the Opium war, the arrival of Perry to Japan, the ratification of the unequal treaties and the opening of Yokohama as a foreign port. Against this historical background, Tsugunosuke’s fascination for things foreign in Nagasaki tells an unexpected story – the story of an undying admiration for the Chinese cultural model and of a cautious curiosity slowly turning into appreciation for the (material) culture of the west.