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Posting Meme: What's your favorite weird fact about premodern Japan?
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yhlee – What's your favorite weird fact about premodern Japan?
Oh boy. My immediate instinct is to ask, "What's pre-modern Japan?", but that's because any amount of academic training makes people want to draw hard lines. I'm going to go with the start of the Meiji era (1868) as the cutoff, because something something general consensus something something Westernisation something something.*
* on one hand it is perverse to place the cutoff for "modern" at around the same time that Western influences started to take major hold. But on the other hand, Japan really did transition from feudal to more nation-state-y and - perhaps even more importantly - industrialised. There's all sorts of Things to be said about whether this rubric is dictated by... you get my point.
I'm actually incredibly bad at remembering weird/specific facts, but one that has stuck with me was the Japanese global export of silver from just before and throughout the Tokugawa shogunate (1600 - 1868).
I don't know if it's commonly know exactly how much silver Japan was pumping out into the global economy, but it was a lot. People might think of the Potosi mine in Bolivia, but Japan put out something like 30%+ of all silver in the world in the 1600s. Japan dumped silver onto the Portuguese, who then traded it to the Chinese.
Going back to some historical sources I used back in school (!?!), Mexico and Peru – both experiencing silver booms themselves – output something like 1.3 million kilograms of silver from 1560-1640; that is estimated to be one seventh of the trade from Japan to China in the same period. That's a boggling number. Japan produced so much silver it tanked the price of the commodity and dried up their mines. The Iwami Ginzan mine (now a UNESCO world heritage site) is one of my favourite cool places because it produced such a bonkers amount of Japan's silver.
rosefox and any other Watchmaker of Filigree Street fans, you might get a chuckle out of this – historically, daimyo fought like cats over the mine. The Mori (毛利) won it in 1564 and held onto it until the Tokugawa took over. Yes. That Mori.
If you have access to JSTOR, you can read the scintillatingly titled The Production and Uses of Gold and Silver in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan by Kobata on the general topic.
Give me something else to post about in 2020 here!
yhlee – What's your favorite weird fact about premodern Japan?Oh boy. My immediate instinct is to ask, "What's pre-modern Japan?", but that's because any amount of academic training makes people want to draw hard lines. I'm going to go with the start of the Meiji era (1868) as the cutoff, because something something general consensus something something Westernisation something something.*
* on one hand it is perverse to place the cutoff for "modern" at around the same time that Western influences started to take major hold. But on the other hand, Japan really did transition from feudal to more nation-state-y and - perhaps even more importantly - industrialised. There's all sorts of Things to be said about whether this rubric is dictated by... you get my point.
I'm actually incredibly bad at remembering weird/specific facts, but one that has stuck with me was the Japanese global export of silver from just before and throughout the Tokugawa shogunate (1600 - 1868).
I don't know if it's commonly know exactly how much silver Japan was pumping out into the global economy, but it was a lot. People might think of the Potosi mine in Bolivia, but Japan put out something like 30%+ of all silver in the world in the 1600s. Japan dumped silver onto the Portuguese, who then traded it to the Chinese.
Going back to some historical sources I used back in school (!?!), Mexico and Peru – both experiencing silver booms themselves – output something like 1.3 million kilograms of silver from 1560-1640; that is estimated to be one seventh of the trade from Japan to China in the same period. That's a boggling number. Japan produced so much silver it tanked the price of the commodity and dried up their mines. The Iwami Ginzan mine (now a UNESCO world heritage site) is one of my favourite cool places because it produced such a bonkers amount of Japan's silver.
rosefox and any other Watchmaker of Filigree Street fans, you might get a chuckle out of this – historically, daimyo fought like cats over the mine. The Mori (毛利) won it in 1564 and held onto it until the Tokugawa took over. Yes. That Mori. If you have access to JSTOR, you can read the scintillatingly titled The Production and Uses of Gold and Silver in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan by Kobata on the general topic.
Give me something else to post about in 2020 here!