The Underside of the Junk Trade: Maritime Smuggling and Urban Trafficking

ItSmuggling is reasonable to conclude that as long as there were market demands for the trade, restrictions and regulations upon it would leadLead to smugglingSmuggling . Similar to the so-called Japanese piratesJapanese pirates (wokou 倭寇/wakō倭寇) problemWakō(倭寇) → “Japanese pirates” inWokou (倭寇) → “Japanese pirates” the sixteenth century, smugglingSmuggling by junks inevitably developed alongside the introduction of trading restrictions imposed by Tokugawa regime. In order to prevent large outflows of silverSilver overseas as a result of sharp increases in the number of trading junks, as mentioned in Chap. 2 , the shogunate began to fix the annual trading amount (6,000 kanme in 1685) and then the number of annual trading junks (70 in 1688, with many later changes) in the late seventeenth century. Under these regulations, for instance, in 1689, once the 70th junk had arrived, the authorities forbade any more junks to trade in Japan. This certainly meant a huge financial loss for junk merchants, and many turned to smugglingSmuggling in coastal areas other than Nagasaki port to avoid these losses.