Honda Toshiaki, Essay Example

The scholar Honda Toshiaki (1744–1822) lived and died during the period of Japan’s Exclusionary Laws. They had been in effect since the early 17^th Century, but had been progressively repealed between Commodore Peary’s uninvited U.S. naval visit of 1852 and the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The laws had the effect of severely curtailing foreign influence in Japan. Although trade was not abolished, it was monopolized and restricted to certain ports. This monopoly made a few favored merchants extremely wealthy because they could raise the prices of their goods without fear of competition. As a result, many of their major customers were in debt to them, similar to the way that farmers today are usually in debt to their merchants — by buying their supplies on credit and then paying their bills after selling their crops. In Japan this chain of debt continued on down to the lowest landowners, who then oppressed their tenants.

Toshiaki’s goal for Japan had a name in the west: mercantilism. Britain applied it to its own empire, including the American colonies, restricting trade only to Imperial ports and ships. Toshiaki thought that, instead of having a few of its own merchants effectively colonize their own country, Japan could itself become the merchant. Mastering metallurgy and gunpowder would earn Japan its own colonies and all of their wealth, reviving its lost warrior heritage in the process. By colonizing outward instead of inward, war and wealth would go together.

Japan’s Toshiaki and Britain’s George III assumed that their nations would always win their respective wars of colonization. That stopped being true for Britain in 1783, and for Japan in 1945. Today mercantilism is dead, free trade is celebrated, and the world is richer for it.