The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan
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KYOHO REFORMS: SECOND STAGE 455
The significance of the Kujikata osadamegaki was enhanced by the
appearance of two other legal collections. The first of these was the
Ofuregaki Kampo shusei, compiled by the shogunate in 1743, which
consisted of 3,550 official decrees issued from 1615 onward, and the
Sen'yo ruishu, completed separately by the office of the Edo city
magistrates.
Culturally, too, the Kyoho period marks a new epoch. On the one
hand, we have already seen that Yoshimune and those under him
displayed no great interest in traditional scholarship and education.
Yet Confucianism was still an important element in official thinking,
and education, particularly that of the common people, remained a
matter of concern. In 1717, the series of Confucian lectures held at the
Seido at Yushima, the academy patronized by the shogunate, was
opened to the public for the first time. Then, in 1721, the shogunate
issued a textbook specifically for the use of the commoners. This was
the Rikuyu
engi
taii, a translation, with commentary, of a set of pre-
cepts issued in China nearly a century earlier. Yoshimune had had it
rendered into Japanese in the hope that it might be used as
a
text in the
terakoya,
the thousands of little schools throughout Japan where com-
moners learned to read and write. It was also during this period that
the bakufu encouraged the opening of private academies, again with
the intention of fostering the education of the common people, al-
though the ultimate goal was more the creation of
a
docile and tracta-
ble public than a concern with pure intellectual achievement.
47
The shogunate was also especially interested in learning that had
practical applications. Scholars like Muro Kyuso and Ogyu Sorai were
often approached for advice on current affairs or else were asked to
search ancient Chinese and Japanese histories for legal and historical
precedents.
48
Approaches were also made to the Dutch in the hopes of
discovering what conditions were like in Europe or of acquiring new
technical skills. Yoshimune himself contributed enormously to the
development of Western learning in Japan simply because of his own
keen personal interest in science and technology. He put entire genera-
tions of future scholars in his debt by allowing Chinese translations of
Western books into Japan after 1720.
49
By emphasizing the more immediately useful branches of learning,
47 Tsuji, Tokugawa, pp. 254-60; and Tsuji Tatsuya, "Kyoho kaikaku to jugaku," in Saigusa
Hiroto kinen ronshu iinkai, ed., Saigusa Hiroto kinen
ronshu:
Sekai ni
okeru
Nihon no bunka
(Tokyo: Daiichi hold shuppan, 1965), pp.
46-51.
48 Tsuji, Tokugawa, pp. 261-70, 229-30; and Tsuji, "Kyoho kaikaku to jugaku," pp. 40-46.
49 Tsuji, Tokugawa, pp. 271-8; Ito Tasaburo, "Kinsho no kenkyu," Rekishi
chiri
58 (October-
November 1936): 313-46, 421-70.
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456 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Yoshimune's administration undeniably helped change the direction of
Japanese thought, deflecting it away from speculative philosophy and
toward the areas of natural science, classical study, and textual analy-
sis,
a shift that helped clear the way for the intellectual revolution of
the eighteenth century. It
is
doubtful, however, whether the shogun or
any of his advisers had ever really foreseen such a consequence. Their
aim was far more restricted, for in this, as in everything else they did,
they tried only to stabilize the form of government that they had
inherited and that was, they knew, beginning to totter.
THE HOREKI PERIOD
Tokugawa Yoshimune retired in the autumn of 1745, installing as
ninth shogun his eldest son Ieshige. There seems to have been no
political reason for this change. In all probability Yoshimune, now past
his sixtieth year, simply felt it appropriate to give way to his thirty-
rive-year-old heir apparent. Some misgivings must have accompanied
the transfer, however, for the new shogun was an invalid, the conse-
quence perhaps of too many years of intemperance.
Even though Ieshige was one of the least capable of
all
the shoguns,
however, the government ran smoothly enough, at least on the surface,
throughout the 1750s. Of course, the land-tax revenues never again
reached the level of 1744, but between 1746 and 1764 collections
averaged 1.65 million
koku
yearly, a level slightly ahead of
the
1737-to-
1745 period, producing the highest sustained averages for the entire
Edo period. Land-tax revenues during the years 1746 to 1764 were
remarkably stable, with very little fluctuation. Under these conditions
the government treasury, which in 1742 held a reserve of 1 million
gold pieces, swelled to 2.5 million by 1753, and to 3 million by 1770,
the largest reserve ever produced during the Tokugawa period.
50
Underneath this apparent tranquillity, however, there were reasons
for suspecting that the Tokugawa bakufu, by the 1750s, had already
reached the limits of its power and that crises of various sorts were
beginning to emerge. One of them, in fact, may have been a succession
crisis,
for no sooner had Yoshimune retired than his old ally, Senior
Councilor Matsudaira Norimura, was removed from office and de-
prived of ten thousand koku of his domain. The
Tokugawa
jikki cov-
50 Tsuji Tatsuya, "Bakusei-shi.kara mita Kyoho yori Tanuma e no katei ni tsuite," Rekishigaku
kenkyu 264 (April-May 1962): 63-66; and Tsuji Tatsuya, "Horeki-Temmei-ki no seiji josei,"
in Kitajima Masamoto, ed., Seijishi, vol. 11 of Taikei Nihon-shi
sosho,
pi. 2 (Tokyo: Yamakawa
shuppan-sha, 1965), pp. 247-8.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE HOREKI PERIOD 457
ered over the incident by observing that "nobody knew the reason,
which was kept secret." The Zoku
sanno
gaiki, on the other hand,
claimed that Matsudaira Norimura, believing Ieshige to be too frail to
make a good shogun, pressed the case of Yoshimune's second son,
Tayasu Munetake, thereby incurring Yoshimune's hostility. This latter
is not an especially reliable source, but it is clear that some tension
existed between Ieshige and his younger brother, for just two years
after Matsudaira's dismissal, Munetake was ordered to spend three
years under house arrest, so a succession dispute of
some
kind is by no
means an implausible hypothesis.
51
After Matsudaira's departure, government in the Tokugawa admin-
istrative structure devolved on a number of people, all of them
judged by historians to have been mild and conscientious. One of
these was Ooka Tadamitsu, a man whose spectacular rise from obscu-
rity matched that of Arai Hakuseki and Manabe Akifusa. For some
scholars, Ooka was the prototype of Tanuma Okitsugu, who later
dominated the shogunate from a similar position, but the fact is that
Ooka was deficient in both ability and authority. It was almost as if
all involved in shogunal politics had agreed that power should not be
monopolized by any single individual.
52
One of the most obvious characteristics of Ieshige's administration
was the relatively severe treatment of the daimyo. The earlier Kyoho
Reforms had concentrated on the shogunal level, and few daimyo had
been called to account for maladministration within their domains. If
we exclude those cases in which daimyo domains were confiscated or
reduced because of
the
daimyo's inability to produce an heir, only two
daimyo were punished by Yoshimune for breaches of discipline. As it
happens, both of those concerned had gone mad and murdered peo-
ple.
Other flagrant breaches were punished by simple sentences of
house arrest rather than by confiscation. Such, at least, was the punish-
ment meted out to Tokugawa Muneharu of Owari, who publicly criti-
cized the shogunate's frugality drive, preferring to beggar his own
domain through an alternative policy of free spending, and to the
notoriously dissolute Sakakibara Masamine of Himeji, whose pur-
chases of Yoshiwara courtesans had raised many eyebrows.
Ieshige's government, on the other hand, initiated a succession of
confiscations, beginning with Senior Councilor Matsudaira Nori-
51 Mikami Sanji, Edo jidai shi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Fuzambo, 1944), pp. 286-90; Tsuji, "Horeki-
Temmei," pp. 239-41; and Tsuji, Tokugawa, pp. 301-2.
52 Mikami, Edo, pp. 290-6; Tsuji, "Bakusei-shi," pp. 63-4; Matsuo Masaji, "Horeki-ki
seikyoku no doko ni tsuite," Rekishi chiri 91 (April 1968): 21-36.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
458 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
mura's loss of ten thousand koku in 1745. This was followed by the
punishments of Uemura Tsunetomo of Katsuura in 1751, Ando
Nobutada of Kano in 1755, Kanamori Yorikane of Gujo in 1758, and
Honda Tadanaka of Sagara in the same year. All, with the exception of
Norisato, were punished for supposed misrule, whether in their do-
mains or in their personal households. The 1758 punishments of
Kanamori and Honda came in the wake of peasant uprisings, for
example. Clearly, despite the deficiencies of the shogun
himself,
his
administration could sense a looming crisis and displayed its concern
by giving renewed attention to the conduct of local government
throughout Japan.
It was this same concern that also gave rise to a far stricter attitude
toward the shogunate's own finances and the administration of the
Tokugawa house domain, bringing with it a spate of penalties against
local officials. In the twelve years between 1748 and 1759, for exam-
ple,
a total of thirty-two finance and local officials were either dis-
missed or deprived of their stipends. Previous purges undertaken by
Tsunayoshi and Yoshimune had emphasized punishments for embez-
zling and misappropriation of taxes by members of the traditional
official class in rural areas. As a result, these families had been largely
removed from office by 1720 and replaced by bureaucrats held more
directly accountable to top administrators in Edo. As a result, the
shogunate's income from the land tax had increased.
In the purges of the 1750s, however, the victims came almost en-
tirely from among those bureaucrats introduced into local government
by Yoshimune; not a few of them had built up considerable reputa-
tions for their efforts in the Kyoho Reforms. Just why they were now
being punished is far from clear - records offer little in the way of
explanation beyond laconic statements like "corruption" or the even
more cryptic "with reason." Whatever the case, the heroes of the
Kyoho period had become the villains of
the
Horeki period (1751-64),
a development from which it is possible to deduce that the nature of
the shogunate's problems was changing.
Not all administrators involved in local government were purged,
however. Several families, the Okada and Ibi among them, were com-
mended in 1767 for their management of the areas entrusted to them,
which meant that they had produced greater tax revenues without
alienating the common people. This latter fact was particularly signifi-
cant, for the high tax yields of the Kyoho period, won at the cost of
peasant disaffection, had, by the Horeki period, come to be seen as
counterproductive. Instructions to local officials in 1745, 1748, and
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE HOREKI PERIOD 459
1756 all had cautioned against excessive taxation, so for the Horeki
period the model official was one who could keep the peasants happy
and at the same time provide stable tax revenues.
53
Underlying this
new,
more conciliatory attitude toward
local
adminis-
tration lay the fear of mounting popular unrest. This had been growing
steadily since the latter stages of the Kyoho Reforms. In the thirty-five
years between 1681 and 1715, there had been 426 incidents of peasant
protest; the succeeding thirty-five-year period, from 1716 to
1750,
pro-
duced 724, or almost twice as many.
54
Their scale was growing, too. A
revolt in Iwakitaira in 1738 eventually involved an estimated 84,000
farmers, and later that year a similar protest near the silver mines at
Ikuno was put down only through the intervention of troops from
thirteen different daimyo domains. Not since the great Shimabara Re-
bellion of
a
century before had Japan seen such an emergency.
55
In one sense the incidence and scale of peasant protest can be seen as
simply an extension of earlier patterns. The nature of the protests
themselves, however, was quite different. Previously, such incidents
had been directed against oppressive rulers and increased taxes and
had only a limited measure of
success.
Now, in some instances, plans
to increase taxation were brought to a standstill, and in others - as in
the case of Kanamori Yorikane - peasant protest was enough to force
the removal of the daimyo
himself,
together with a number of high
officials who had been bribed to keep quiet about the affair.
56
Several
domains were also to see faction disputes among their samurai linked
with, and echoed by, peasant revolts, one of the most notable examples
taking place at Kurume in 1754.
57
Clearly, the authority of Japan's ruling class was coming under chal-
lenge more and more during the 1750s. Ultimately, not even the sho-
gun was exempt from criticism. In 1759, for example, a Shinto scholar
named Takenouchi Shikibu was banished from Kyoto for having ex-
pressed his belief that Japan was displaying all the classic signs of a
realm in disarray. This was also the year in which Yamagata Daini, in
his Ryushi
shinron,
called attention to the shortcomings of Tokugawa
rule.
Both Takenouchi and Yamagata were idealists, but in their mis-
53 Tsuji, "Bakusei-shi," pp. 64-6.
54 Aoki Koji, Hyakusho ikki
sogd nempyo
(Tokyo: San-ichi shobo, 1971), pp.
29-31.
55 Tsuji, Tokugawa, p. 196.
56 Hayashi Motoi, "Horeki, Temmei-ki no shakai josei," in Iwanami koza Nikon
rekishi,
vol. 12
(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1963), pp. 106-13; and Yamada Tadao, "Horeki, Meiwa-ki no
hyakusho ikki," in Nihon keizai-shi taikei, vol. 4 (kinsei 2) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku
shuppankai, 1965), pp. 134-49.
57 Ito Tasaburo, Nihon
kinsei-shi,
vol. 11 (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1952), pp. 222-9.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
460 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
givings about the stability of Japanese government and society, they
expressed the criticisms of a great many of their fellow countrymen.
The same mood was also reflected in the work of the Tohoku philoso-
pher Ando Shoeki, who was currently writing his own critique of the
Tokugawa class system.
58
THE TANUMA PERIOD
In the summer of 1760, Ieshige resigned, leaving the office to his son
Ieharu. His actions were likely prompted by his despondency over the
death the previous month of Ooka Tadamitsu, reputedly the only high
official capable of understanding the shogun's stammerings and inter-
preting them to the outside world. Intimation of his own mortality
may also have played a part, as Ieshige was to die the following year.
Ieharu took no greater part in government than his father had. He
ruled for twenty-six years, from his accession in 1760 to his death in
1786 but, during this time government policy was guided chiefly by
Ieharu's personal adviser, Tanuma Okitsugu, whose immense influ-
ence earned these years the title of "the Tanuma period." It is often
claimed that Tanuma deliberately excluded the shogun from govern-
ment, or at the very least manipulated him into doing what Tanuma
himself wished, but this is far too simple.
59
The processes at work
were much more impersonal and were related not so much to individ-
ual strengths and weaknesses as to the fact that the task of government
was now far too complex for any one man to control.
Tanuma Okitsugu is so commonly associated with corruption, at
least in the popular mind, that even today any political scandal is likely
to evoke highly colored journalistic comparisons with the eighteenth-
century politician. Certainly, the stories of Tanuma's cupidity and
venality are greatly exaggerated, often wildly so, but undoubtedly
Tanuma and those around him accepted bribes more or less openly.
Similarly, there were others no less willing to offer bribes to Tanuma
and his circle. Even the sanctimonious Matsudaira Sadanobu later
confessed to having occasionally given money to Tanuma in order to
obtain more influence. It should be remembered, however, that this
kind of corruption was part of the fabric of Tokugawa political life.
Nobody was immune to it, nor was the practice condemned as it is
today. Senior Councilor Matsudaira Takemoto, held by posterity to
58 Tsuji Zennosuke,
Tanuma
jidai (Tokyo: Nihon gakujutsu fukyu-kai, 1915), pp. 260-3;
afl
d
Hayashi, "Horeki," pp. 128-31.
59 Tsuji, Tanuma, pp. 21-7.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE TANUMA PERIOD 461
have been a model of decorum, was no less guilty than Tanuma in this
respect. Date Shigemura of Sendai, writing to his retainers in 1765,
noted that if he wanted a higher court rank he would have to buy off
both Matsudaira and Tanuma.
60
The issue of corruption aside, Tanuma Okitsugu faced some very
severe problems. To begin with, the living standards of all bakufu
vassals, regardless of rank, continued to decline. In particular, those
who did not hold official positions in the bureaucracy, and were accord-
ingly totally dependent on their inherited stipends, were subject to
sharp financial distress. Living in Edo, surrounded by temptations to
spend money they did not have, only made their deteriorating stan-
dards of living more difficult to tolerate. So much had already become
apparent during the Kyoho period; the passage of time simply made
matters worse.
61
This exacted its toll in both human and institutional
terms.
These retainers constituted the bakufu's standing army, and
their progressive impoverishment meant the inevitable erosion of the
government's military capabilities.
Government finances also began to collapse during the 1760s. True,
between 1746 and 1764 the annual revenue from the land tax averaged
1.65 million koku, the highest sustained level during the Tokugawa
period, but thereafter, from 1765 to 1779, that figure slumped to 1.52
million koku. Then from 1780 to 1786 - even excluding the two fam-
ine years of 1783 and 1786 (1.21 million and 1.08 million koku,
respectively) - the annual average fell an additional 12 percent, to
1.45 million koku. Government reserves dropped accordingly, from 3
million gold pieces in 1770 to 2.2 million in 1788. The great Temmei
famine, which lasted from 1782 to 1787, and the disastrous Edo
fire
of
1772 also contributed to this
financial
downturn, as both caused loss of
income and both required massive government relief measures.
62
The economic measures implemented by the bakufu to combat this
problem were far from popular among conservatives, who saw in them
palpable proof of corruption within the administration. More recently,
however, some historians have come to judge these policies in a more
positive light.
63
They interpret the various new measures - among
them the development of mines; the establishment of government
monopolies in ginseng, camphor, copper, iron, and brass; the creation
of associations of merchants specifically authorized to handle such
commodities as seed-oil and sulfur; and the levying of licensing fees
60
Ibid.,
pp.
11-21,60-6,234.
61
Ibid.,
pp.
67-92,
339-40.
62
Tsuji,
"Horeki,"
pp.
252-3;
Tsuji,
Tanuma,
pp.
116-34.
63
Tsuji,
"Horeki,"
pp.
186-219,
337-8.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
462 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
(myogakiri)
- as attempts to broaden the government's economic base
and allow it to take advantage of commercial development.
64
Yet, the impact of these new initiatives on the bakufu's finances is
still questionable. The lack of detailed records does not permit any
certainty, but there is reason to doubt that they had much effect at all.
Certainly the licensing fees demanded of merchants were not burden-
some. According to guidelines announced in 1770, members of the
licensed oil-seed guild of Osaka were obliged to pay an initial sum of
twenty gold pieces and, thereafter, an annual fee of three gold pieces -
a ludicrously small sum in view of the volume of oil-seed trade at the
time.
Other guilds appear to have paid at much the same rate, so it is
more appropriate to conceive of the licensing fees simply as registra-
tion dues rather than as an attempt to tap commercial wealth.
65
The more convincing explanation of Tanuma's attempt to force
merchants into monopolistic associations concerns his desire to control
prices. Previously, during the Kyoho Reforms, the shogunate had
become concerned about fluctuations in the price of rice as well as the
increase in other commodity prices and had first tried its hand at
commercial controls. At that time, the main object of official attention
was the various Edo wholesalers (ton'ya) as the authorities tried to
regulate the price of goods sent from Osaka. In subsequent years the
shogunate shifted its attention from Edo to Osaka and tried to police
directly the Osaka wholesalers who shipped goods to Edo. With seed-
oil used in lamps, for example, the government strengthened the mo-
nopoly of the Edo wholesalers in 1741, by refusing to allow any other
merchants to import directly from Osaka. From 1753 onward it also
began to bolster the Osaka wholesalers, insisting in 1770 that all in-
volved in oil pressing in the Osaka area form an association and come
under the supervision of the Osaka oil market. This reinforced the
privileged position of the Osaka oil wholesalers and also depressed the
price of oil, as it maximized the quantity handled in Osaka, an area
under constant bakufu supervision.
66
One feature of the Tanuma period was the emergence of specula-
tors,
men from outside the normal commercial establishment who
came to have an inordinate degree of influence on Tanuma and his
associates. Through their political activities, these men - known as
yamashi by their contemporaries - were responsible for several new
64 Ito, Nihon, pp. 160-8.
65 Miyamoto Mataji, Kabunakama
no
kenkyu (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1938), pp. 132-45.
66 Tsuda Hideo, Hoken keizai
seisaku
no tenkai to shijo kozo (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo, 1961),
pp.
26-62.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE TANUMA PERIOD 463
initiatives. Some of these were successful; many failed. It was at the
urging of these men, for example, that government offices were set up
to oversee the activities of the rice market, to regulate the flow of
goods from Osaka to Edo, and to lend out money at low rates of
interest. Elsewhere, these speculators were responsible for a plan to
set up ten inspection posts in the Kanto area to check the quality of
silk and silk goods produced there, with the costs of inspection to be
borne by the purchaser. This proved to be one of the failures, as the
scheme resulted in considerable opposition from local peasants, who
ultimately expressed their anger by destroying the houses of the
scheme's originators and by marching into Takasaki, the castle town of
Senior Councilor Matsudaira Terutaka. The bakufu had no option but
to dismantle the whole enterprise.
67
Another new element in Tanuma's economic policies involved
moneylending. During the Kyoho Reforms the government had tried
to stabilize the price of rice by permitting the use of promissory notes
in speculative ventures into the rice market, but this had only encour-
aged various daimyo domains - all of them under
financial
pressures -
to issue promissory notes without the money to guarantee them. In
1761,
therefore, the government forbade daimyo to issue any promis-
sory notes unless they were able to redeem them, and in 1767 it further
ordered Osaka merchants not to accept such notes. Then, in 1782, the
shogunate appointed the cloth merchant Goto Nuinosuke as inspector
of rice promissory notes in Osaka and assigned to him the task of
restoring confidence in the paper currency.
The practice of moneylending between merchants and peasants had
also grown, as farmers increasingly required help in meeting their
farming expenses or their taxes. In 1767 the shogunate intervened and
established an agency in Osaka to oversee any loans in which houses
had been pledged as security. Already in 1760, the government had set
up an office to deal with small loans in copper cash and followed this in
1770 with a similar office dealing with silver cash. Finally in 1786, the
bakufu issued a law under which, for the next
five
years, money was to
be collected from all peasants, townspeople, and religious foundations
in Japan, at a predetermined rate, and such money, augmented by the
bakufu's own funds, was to be lent out to the daimyo. Tanuma was
removed from office, however, before this could be put into effect.
68
67 Matsumoto Shiro, "Shohin ryutsu no hatten to ryutsu kiko no saihensei," in Nihon keizaishi
taikei, vol. 4 (kinsei 2) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1965), pp. 92-3, 96-9, 127-30;
and Tsuji,
Tanuma,
pp. 204-7.
68 Matsumoto, "Shohin," pp. 96-9; and Tsuji,
Tanuma,
pp. 207-12.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
464 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
There were also noteworthy developments under Tanuma in the
area of coinage. One of these concerned silver coins, always a vexed
issue, as no specific weights had ever been established for them. This
was a matter of considerable inconvenience, for it meant that coins had
to be weighed for every transaction involving silver. Tanuma tried to
put an end to that in 1765 by issuing a coin that conformed to the
precious metal content established by Yoshimune in 1736 and weighed
precisely five
momme
(a little over half an ounce). It was a praiseworthy
initiative but, as with so many of Tanuma's ideas, did not translate
into reality quite as anticipated. First, the coin was regarded with very
great suspicion, perhaps because the coin and the concept behind it
were unfamiliar. Two years later, when the bakufu declared that
twelve of these silver coins were to be worth one gold piece, rumors
attributed the change to a plot by moneychangers who wished to profit
from the fluctuations in the exchange rate.
In 1722 another new silver coin was minted, the
nanryo
nishuban,
which was given the official but arbitrary value of one-eighth of
a
gold
piece. This coin was therefore an oddity, a silver coin whose value was
defined only in terms of gold. In all probability the shogunate was
hoping to use this coin to break down the inconvenient dual-currency
system under which western Japan carried out its affairs in silver, and
eastern Japan in gold. Unfortunately, because Tanuma was associated
with it, this initial attempt failed, being interpreted as yet another
example of the senior councilor's shiftiness.
69
Yet, this attempt to
convert the whole country to a gold standard was a rational approach
to the problem, and indeed, later politicians were to try it again suc-
cessfully in the nineteenth century.
Tanuma also introduced great changes in foreign trade. Ever since
the beginning of Japan's isolation in the early seventeenth century, the
general tendency in matters of foreign trade had been toward greater
restriction, aimed at preventing the outflow of Japan's gold, silver, and
copper reserves. Tanuma, however, adopted a vigorous export policy
in an attempt to reverse these trade imbalances. By the late eighteenth
century, there was a growing demand for what were referred to as
tawaramono,
that is, the various marine products like shark fins, sea
slugs,
and seaweed so prized in Chinese cooking. Tanuma proceeded
to urge increased production and export of these items to help reverse
Japan's trade imbalance. This initiative, at least, would seem to have
been successful, as it was claimed that Tanuma's new silver pieces
69 Tsuji,
Tanuma,
pp. 175-85; and Ito,
Kinsei,
pp. 163-7.
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