Matsumae and Ainu Trade: From Retainers’ Trading Rights to Merchant Contractors

Ainu people were not cut off from the wider world. Hokkaido’s digital museum introduces exchanges in which kelp and salmon moved toward Honshu while Chinese ceramics and copper coins reached Hokkaido. The Foundation for Ainu Culture also describes iron goods, lacquerware and sake moving northward.

These connections were not a one-way movement of northern raw materials. People produced, exchanged and used goods that crossed regional boundaries. The history of Matsumae’s institutions begins within an existing world of exchange, rather than with the creation of trade where none had previously existed.

Archaeology provides another kind of evidence for that earlier world. Kaminokuni’s explanation of Katsuyama introduces ceramics from China and different Japanese regions, together with bone and antler objects. Such finds help investigate movement and daily life, but they do not prove that the later Edo-period contracting system already existed at this medieval site.

Reading a provision and establishing whether people lived according to it are different tasks. The document contains language concerning movement, while later arrangements around trading areas increasingly restricted Ainu freedom in commerce. One page cannot stand in for the social history of the whole Edo period.

The reverse shortcut is also misleading. Later harsh control should not be presented as if every aspect of it had already been written into the 1604 clauses. The wording, its interpretation and the operation of institutions over subsequent generations need their own evidence.

Keeping rules and practice apart therefore does not minimize later restrictions. It makes the process of change easier to examine. The question becomes how relationships altered through particular institutions and periods, rather than whether one document can be made to describe every later experience.

A holder of a trading area sent a ship to exchange goods with Ainu people there. Products obtained through that exchange could then be sold at Matsumae to merchants connected with Honshu. The proceeds supported the holder’s livelihood.

Several roles were involved in the same cargo: those producing the goods, those conducting the exchange and merchants buying at the port. Northern products and goods brought from Honshu moved through these connected transactions. The ship was one element within a wider chain of relationships.

The particular goods and conditions must still be checked for their place and period. A general explanation of the arrangement does not establish the same inventory or exchange terms in every locality. It identifies how transactions could be organized, without turning that outline into a complete account of each trading area.

Under basho ukeoi-sei, a retainer received a set payment while a merchant undertook management of the trading area. Hokkaido’s digital museum places the emergence of this arrangement in the first half of the eighteenth century. This differs from the stage in which the retainer conducted the trade directly.

The payment received by the holder was called unjokin. It is useful to distinguish two flows: money moving from the contractor to the holder, and products moving from fishing and production areas toward markets. The former supplied income to the party granting management; the latter formed part of the merchant’s operation.

Neither flow fully describes the people doing the work. A discussion confined to management payments can obscure Ainu production and labor, while a discussion confined to cargoes can obscure control over trading rights. The changed relationship between right holders and operating merchants needs to be considered together with those other relationships.

Merchants increasingly did more than exchange products: they operated fisheries. With greater demand and production came the use of Ainu people as workers in those enterprises. Producing goods and exchanging them on one’s own account differs from working in a fishery managed by someone else.

A story told only through flourishing ports can conceal that difference. Even if similar kinds of marine products continued to arrive in Honshu, relationships at the place of production could be changing. The position of the person supplying the product matters alongside its destination.

An increase in the volume traded is therefore not sufficient evidence that people’s lives became more prosperous. The degree of control over production, work and exchange also needs examination. These changes must retain their regional and chronological limits rather than be treated as identical experiences for every Ainu community at once.

Matsumae depended on arrangements controlling trade as well as on northern products. The shift from retainers’ trading rights to merchant contracting changed who handled transactions and management, while Ainu people faced substantial restrictions on trade and livelihoods. The original document’s provisions and later practice were not identical.

Esashi’s former Nakamura residence provides another way to consider the merchant side of this history. A Hakodate Bus pamphlet hosted by the Esashi Tourism Association introduces its marine-product brokerage, shipping-wholesaler background and building arrangement extending toward the shore. The architecture helps pose questions about how a trading house worked.

That merchant heritage does not settle the conditions of labor at each fishery supplying it. When looking at a cargo arriving in port, the people who produced it and the parties deciding the terms of exchange should both remain in view. Together they reveal aspects of northern prosperity that the arrival of a wealthy ship alone cannot explain.