Summary

The treaty port system largely defined the legal and spatial parameters of Japan’s international trade and relationships during the second half of the 19th century. The treaty ports were designated port cities along Japan’s coast where foreign vessels anchored and foreigners came ashore to reside and conduct trade within circumscribed geographical limits. The system was based on a series of treaties that the Japanese negotiated with Western powers, especially the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, under the threat of force at a time when the Japanese shogunate did not wish to alter the country’s highly restricted level of foreign engagement. The treaties followed similar ones that had already been signed in China and they served as the instruments of informal imperialism’s advance into the region. The resulting infrastructure joined new patterns of transportation and trade with longer-standing domestic and East Asian regional networks, linking Japan’s treaty ports to those in China and to broader networks of global exchange that used common currencies, regulatory principles, institutions, and shipping lines.

The five port cities, to varying degrees, became cosmopolitan sites where Japanese, European, American, and Chinese merchants traded, tourists visited, sailors took shore leave, traffickers operated, and consular officials, diplomats, and judges endeavored to manage interactions in their own national interests. The treaty ports were the centers of a maritime infrastructure that also served Japan’s rapid modernization, the return of its full sovereignty, and its emergence as an imperial power in Asia, including through naming Special Trading Ports at home and establishing treaty ports in Korea and Taiwan. Overall, the treaty port system structured and informed Japan’s international relations within a competitive global environment dominated by imperialist expansion, capitalist accumulation, industrial and technological revolutions, resource extraction, and new patterns of global migration and labor, as well as shifting practices of access and exclusion throughout the Pacific world.