Simon James Bytheway

Liberalization, internationalization, and globalization: charting the course of foreign investment in the finance and commerce of Japan, 1945-2009

Abstract As the worlds largest creditor nation, with some of the worlds largest banks and leading industries, Japan is often portrayed as an economic and financial superpower. With long-established ‘Western-style’ financial institutions to represent it in all the worlds major financial capitals and markets, a technologically savvy Japan is often said to be positioning itself to lead Asia, the Asia/Pacific region, or even the entire world, into the marvels of the twenty-first century. Against this continuing rhetorical backdrop, however, fundamental questions arise as to Japans ability to internationalize in todays increasingly globalized world economy. Domestically, only a very limited presence is permitted to the foreigner in the Japanese economy, especially in the commanding heights of finance. Japans leading city and regional banks have only recently begun to offer services that have long been thought of as standard in other industrialized economies, such as foreign exchange, 24/7 ATM access, phone and internet banking, while they continue to pay customers for their ‘service’ with tissues and toilet paper. How, in what ways, and to what end, is Japans business and financial world becoming international, or globalized, as it confronts the global financial crisis?

Reconsidering the Yokohama "Gold Rush" of 1859

Great Power gunboat diplomacy brought a host of problems to Japan’s shores. The initial Kanagawa Treaty of 1854 was innocuous enough, merely allowing foreign ships to call at specified ports for supplies, but the commercial treaties hammered out by Townsend Harris and employed by other Western nations were another matter. These “unequal” treaties created disputes over property, jurisdictions, trade methods, and more than anything else, money. Indeed, financial conflict was to be a defining feature of Japan’s forced opening (kaikoku). In the historical narrative of early modern Japan, these conflicts have often been condensed into a single event: the Yokohama Gold Rush. The gold rush has been portrayed as the exploitation of a small, peace-loving Asian nation by the rapacious, imperialist West. A more nuanced, global look, however, tells a different story, a story of calculated arbitrage, inter-related exchange, diplomatic failure, and hyperinflation, which culminates in revolution and regime change.

The Arrival of the “Modern” West in Yokohama: Images of the Japanese Experience, 1859–1899

As the 150th anniversary of the opening of Japan’s treaty ports is celebrated by its citizens, it is appropriate that we also acknowledge the important contribution made by the treaty ports to Japan’s economic development and, more broadly, modernisation. My research aims to uncover the agents and mechanisms, individual and institutional, involved in the transmission of ideas and technology between the newly opened Japan and the industrialised West. In the following study, I would particularly like to discuss some of the most significant images and visual constructs of the treaty ports—the woodblock prints of Yokohama (Yokohama-e)—with their remarkable detail of unprecedented interactions and cooperation, and introduce the concept of wakon yōsai, which is central to understanding Japan’s historic modernisation.