The Japanese Merchants

They came before the quarter had a name

The earliest date the record offers is a note made in passing. A French-language bulletin printed at Huế quoted Father Diego Advarte on a religious incident near Hội An. In the same breath it recorded that on the road to Đà Nẵng there were Japanese traders aboard a ship lying at anchor in 1583.

Copy of a sixteenth or seventeenth-century painting · uploaded by Vuvietanh6204 · CC0

The ground they put in at was not empty. A gazetteer of Thuận Quảng compiled at the end of the sixteenth century already listed a village called Hoài Phố, and it was a Vietnamese village. The Japanese settled inside a village that had owners, rather than laying out a quarter of their own on open sand.

At first they sailed with the monsoon and went home when the trading was done. Then they built warehouses, houses and landing stages. A place to stay became a place to live.

No ship sailed without the red seal

From 1600 the shoguns held the running of Japan under the bakufu, the tent government, while the throne kept the ceremony. Nine years before that, in 1591, an official of the Nguyễn house in Đàng Trong, CochinchinaiHISTORICAL EXONYMCochinchinaAn old place name that meant different parts of Việt Nam in different periods. In the 16th and 17th centuries Europeans used it for the whole of Đại Việt, or for Đàng Trong alone — the southern realm of the Nguyễn lords. Under French rule the sense narrowed again, to Nam Kỳ, the south of the country. The land it named was Vietnamese throughout; only the foreigners' word for it kept moving. on European charts, had written to Toyotomi Hideyoshi asking to open trade. The door was being pushed from both sides.

To bring foreign trade to order the bakufu set up the shuinsen system and issued the shuinjō, a permit stamped in red, to Japanese ships going abroad. The system ran from 1602 to 1635. Hội An lay on the line joining China to Japan and to Southeast Asia, which made it a calculated stop rather than an accidental one.

Gaiban shokan, compiled by Kondō Jūzō, completed 1818 · National Archives of Japan · public domain

The counts of those permits do not agree. One reckoning gives 354 permits issued between 1604 and 1634, of which 130 permits went to ships trading directly with Đại Việt and 86 to ships bound for Hội An. The Japanese historian Iwao Seiichi counted 355 permits for 1604 to 1635, and counting voyages instead of papers he found 85 voyages into Đàng Trong. The gap is a gap of units. A sheet of paper and a voyage are not the same thing.

The two counts meet at one point. Nowhere in the region took more red-seal ships than Đàng Trong.

Two towns side by side

Cristoforo Borri, an Italian Jesuit, spent four years in Đàng Trong, and his report took the year 1621 for its title. FaifoiTRADERS' NAME FOR HỘI ANFaifoWhat foreign merchants wrote in their logs for Hội An, commonly explained as coming from Hoài Phố (also recorded as Hải Phố). It was a name for a port of call, not for a foreign possession: the town stood under the Nguyễn lords, and the merchants lived there by their leave.“Hội An” — Wikipedia tiếng Việt, he wrote, was large enough that one could speak of two towns, one Chinese and one Japanese. Each had its own quarter, its own governor and its own customs.

The Japanese residents governed themselves. They acted as consuls and interpreters between Japanese merchants and the local administration, ran the trading houses and the warehouses, and found lodging for merchants and crews when a ship came in. The quarter worked as a concession under the general supervision of the Nguyễn government.

From the handscroll “Chaya Shinroku Kōchi tokō zukan”, Jōmyō-ji, Nagoya · public domain

Not everyone in it had come to trade. The bakufu was proscribing Christianity at home, so among the Japanese in the southern port there were men who had come to be out of reach. A Jesuit residence in the country held four men, two priests and two brothers, who preached to local people and to the Japanese who came to trade. Their report gave a figure: 82 baptisms, 27 of them adults.

The same report noted a small change without making anything of it. In earlier years there had been only 2 formal marriages in the place, whereas that year every couple married formally, and the Japanese now took women as wives instead of keeping them as concubines.

82 is a small figure. What it counts is not cargo.

They brought metal and took away plants

Japanese merchants did more than buy and sell. They moved precious metal. Silver came from Japan into Hội An and went out again as silk, cinnamon, eaglewood and other produce of Đàng Trong. Their ships also carried in porcelain, cannon, gunpowder, paper and minerals.

Traders packed the year into fairs that ran four months. Borri recorded that at each fair the Chinese brought in goods worth four to five million reckoned in silver, and the Japanese came with a few ships they called Somme, carrying a great quantity of very fine silk.

Borri also explained the oddest thing about that market. Silver there was not money. It was a commodity, dear at one time and cheap at another according to how much of it was about, exactly like silk.

A painting settles which quarter was larger

The Chaya house of Nagasaki had a handscroll painted of its trading voyage to Giao ChỉiA HAN COMMANDERY NAMEGiao Chỉ · 交趾“Giao Chỉ” was the name of the commandery the Han court imposed on the Vietnamese lands from the 2nd century BC. It later widened into the name China and Japan used for the country as a whole — and that pronunciation is the root of “Cochinchina”, the Western name for Đàng Trong, the realm that held the busy port of Hội An in the 16th–18th centuries.. It dates from the early seventeenth century and is kept at Jōmyō-ji temple in Nagoya. One stretch of it shows two quarters at Hội An, each labelled in characters: the Japanese quarter as Nihonmachi, the Chinese quarter as Tōjinmachi.

The two are not drawn alike. The Japanese quarter is a long row of two-storey tiled houses with a market of stalls beside it and people moving through. The Chinese quarter is three short rows of thatched houses raised on posts, two rows lengthwise and one across, on the far bank facing it. The researchers who read the painting take it that in the early seventeenth century the Japanese quarter was the busier of the two.

Japanese handscroll, early seventeenth century · artist unknown · public domain

A stele cut in 1640 in the Hoa Nghiêm cave at Ngũ Hành Sơn puts a count beside the painting. In its list of donors towards a temple, Japanese individuals and households come to 13 and Chinese to 3.

Then the two changed places. After 1635 the Japanese had no way to replace their numbers, while Chinese merchants kept arriving and filled the gap. Neither the recall nor the arrivals were decided at Hội An.

Twenty-six years in Nagasaki

Araki Sotarō reached Nagasaki in 1588 and set up there as a shipowner trading abroad. In 1619 he married a young woman from Đàng Trong, and the Nguyễn lord took her as an adopted daughter. The wedding is the best known moment in Vietnamese and Japanese relations of the port century. What follows it is rarely told.

One thing has to be said first. In Japan she is called a princess, but the Nguyễn genealogy records no daughter of that lord named Ngọc Hoa. The stele quoted by Iwao Seiichi says only that in 1619 Araki Sotarō married a young woman of the maternal line of the king of An Nam and that the lord adopted her. The marriage permit names her with two characters meaning a person under protection.

The scroll “Kiyō Suwa Myōjin saishi zu”, nineteenth century · artist unknown · public domain

In 1620 she sailed with her husband to Japan. Fifteen years later Araki Sotarō died, and she did not retire behind the altar. She kept the accounts of his business and worked with the merchants of Nagasaki, chiefly at keeping trade going with the Nguyễn court.

In Nagasaki people called her Anio-san. Where the name came from has two explanations. One takes it as a rendering of a nương, a Vietnamese way of addressing a woman. The other says she called her husband anh, the Vietnamese word for an older man of one's own generation, and that the people around her heard Anio and kept it. Neither has been settled.

She lived 26 years in Japan, died in 1645 and was buried at Daion-ji in the middle of Nagasaki. The story is usually told as far as the wedding. Nobody stages the twenty-six years of bookkeeping.

The last ship

In 1635 the Tokugawa bakufu ordered every Japanese at Hội An home. The red-seal system ended in the same year. The permit that opened the community and the order that closed it stood thirty-three years apart.

Japanese painting, seventeenth century · artist unknown · public domain

The merchants left in turn. The quarter lost the way it replaced its people, and lost its line back to Japan.

A few of the largest traders were not aboard the last ship. They stayed.

The door shut on ships, and the letters still went

One of the men who stayed left a paper trail in Japan. Kadoya Shichirōbei Eikichi was born in 1610 in the harbour ward of Matsusaka in Ise province, the second son of a shipping house. His family name was Matsumoto.

In 1631, at twenty-two, he made his first voyage to Giao Chỉ. Two years later the closing of the country began. The first edict, in 1633, barred the return of any Japanese who had lived abroad more than 5 years, and the edict of 1635 barred return from Southeast Asia altogether. He never went back, and he lived out his life in An Nam.

At Hội An he served as head of the Japanese quarter. A Japanese study records that 6 men headed it one after another between 1633 and 1672, which is to say the quarter that had been called home still had someone running it for nearly forty years afterwards.

Through the years of the closed country he went on writing to his family and kin in Ise, and went on sending donations to the Ise shrine and to temples around Matsusaka. He died in 1672. The memorial stone for him and his family still stands at Raikō-ji in Matsusaka, listed by the city as a historic site in 1985. Japanese records say he was granted the posthumous rank of Junior Fifth in 1928.

The family name is worth a second look. Matsumoto is written with characters read Tùng Bản in Vietnamese, and on the stele of 1640 one couple gave their address as Tùng Bản dinh.

Sixty years nobody can close

The Japanese buried here were not only these few. A researcher at the Hội An heritage centre counted 40 Japanese graves at Hội An. The three largest and easiest to reach lie close together, 300 metres from the first to the second and 600 metres on to the third.

The one in An Phong ward is the grave of a man known as Gusokukun. The stele is grey sandstone. It carries the characters for Japan, then the name, then the date: the year Kỷ Tỵ, mid-autumn, on an auspicious day.

Converted to the Western calendar, the file kept by the heritage centre itself leaves two readings open, 1629 or 1689. One turn of the sexagenary cycle is sixty years. The choice between the two readings is the choice between a man who died while the Japanese quarter was full and a man who died long after it had emptied. Newspapers usually print 1629.

He was a wealthy and powerful merchant, and one source holds that he also headed and ran the whole of the Japanese quarter at Hội An.

The grave itself is almost entirely gone. For a time only the stele and the 1928 restoration tablet survived, and both had to be kept at a Minh Hương temple in town. In 2000 the Taisei corporation paid for repairs and the stones went back. The provincial committee entered the grave in its register of protected sites for 2019 to 2024.

The man who came back after being called home

In the Trường Lệ fields, on a rise of ground among the paddies, is the grave of the merchant Tani Yajirōbei. The sandstone stele carries his name and the year Đinh Hợi, which is 1647, and down the sides four characters reading Nhật Bổn, Bình Hộ. Bình Hộ is Hirado, a port near Nagasaki, and he came from there.

The mound is built of the compound mortar used for every old grave at Hội An, ground sea shell and dried river shell mixed with bời lời bark and cane molasses.

Four tablets now stand beside it, cut in 4 languages: Vietnamese, Japanese, English and French. They say that the closing of the country forced him to leave Hội An for home. He then found every way back, to live with the woman he loved, a girl of Hội An, until the end of his life.

The man who has looked after the grave for years is Nguyễn Đình Hưng, head of the residential group there. He would like to keep a death anniversary for Tani Yajirōbei but does not know the date and will not invent one. After the harvest, farmers from Trường Lệ carry the new rice out and make an offering at the grave.

The stone path to it dates from 1997, when Showa Women's University supported a large restoration. Before that a visitor had to cross a waterlogged field to reach him.

Half a metre of sand and six generations

The grave of the merchant Banjirō lies beside Hai Bà Trưng street in Trường Lệ, hard against the yard and foundations of a family house. The stele gives the year Ất Tỵ, which is 1665, thirty years after the recall.

Behind the grave stands a cement tablet with Japanese characters cut into it. It records that in the third year of Shōwa, 1928, on the proposal of the professor of literature Kuroita Katsumi, Japanese residents of IndochinaiA COLONIAL FEDERATION'S NAMEIndochinaA European coinage for the land lying between India and China, which named a place after the two large countries on either side of it rather than after anybody who lived there. In 1887 the French made it the name of the federation they assembled out of Nam Kỳ, Bắc Kỳ, Trung Kỳ and Cambodia, with Laos added in 1893. A colonial-era record that says Indochina is therefore naming an administration that spanned three countries, not naming Việt Nam.French Indochina — English Wikipedia asked a Mr Nakayama to supervise the repair of this grave. All three Japanese graves at Hội An still carry that tablet.

Then the war went on, and at one point the grave lay under half a metre of sand. In 1975 the people living around it came home, found it buried and dug the earth off it together.

Dương Thị Sáu lives in the house that adjoins the grave. She remembered being told that her husband's family had cared for it for generations, that the war lost it, and that afterwards her husband came back to the family land and put it right. Every year at her own family's death anniversary she buys offerings for Banjirō, and whatever is set out in the house is set out at the grave. Her son-in-law Trần Xuân Lịnh takes the incense when she is away. By his count the household is now 6 generations into the task.

Three Japanese graves at Hội An, and Vietnamese families keep all three.

Hizen porcelain in the soil of the town

Hizen was the old name of a province on Kyushu in the Edo period, its eastern half now in Saga and its western half in Nagasaki. Porcelain there took off in the early seventeenth century, after the war with Korea, when the lords of Kyushu brought Korean potters back with them. The technique was an absolute secret. The potters were kept by their lord and cut off from everyone else.

Surveys and excavations at Hội An from 1990 onwards have shown the town to be thick with Hizen porcelain. Outside the old quarter it comes up at Trảng Sỏi and Thanh Chiếm. Inside it, at the Triều Châu assembly hall, the Cẩm Phô communal house and several houses along Trần Phú street.

Kyushu Ceramic Museum, item 0548-59 · photograph: Pekachu · CC BY-SA 4.0

The richest collection came from a pit at the Tăng family shrine, where the Hizen sherds lay in dense layers beside an earthenware stove, the mark of a place where people had cooked.

The community left no house standing. One structure remains above ground, and it has an entry of its own: the covered bridge the town still calls the Japanese bridge, which the story holds was raised in the days of the Japanese quarter. What else the community left lies under other people's floors.

Coming back for those who went before

Obon is the season when Japanese families sweep the graves. They wipe the stones and light lanterns to bring the ancestors home. The Japanese community living at Hội An does this at Vu Lan, the Vietnamese observance of the seventh lunar month, and the graves they go to are those three.

None of them descends from the three men underneath. A Japanese professor at Showa Women's University put it plainly: no descendants of those merchants can be found in Japan. They go because the three were Japanese, died here, and have nobody at home left to remember them.

Some in the party have a grave of their own to visit. Tomo Usuda went with his mother to the grave of his grandmother, Tani Toshiko, who died at 93 and was buried at Hội An.

On the same visits they go to the memorial for La Hối. His name was La Doãn Chánh, born in 1920 in the Minh Hương village at Hội An. He founded a music society and then joined the anti-Japanese organisation of the local Chinese youth. He fell into Japanese hands, was interrogated, and was killed with 9 others at the foot of Phước Tường mountain on 2 April 1945. He was 25.

Postcard · public domain

They burn incense at both places. Their own people lie here, and so does a man killed by their army.

Four hundred years on, the procession goes again

Hội An has restaged the wedding of Araki Sotarō and the young woman from Đàng Trong at its Vietnamese and Japanese cultural exchanges, the first time in 2016.

Across the sea, the Okunchi festival at Nagasaki runs from 7 to 9 October each year and puts the trading ship back on the street. A boy plays Araki in a yukata and a girl plays her in an áo dài. Two ends of one seventeenth-century voyage, each end staging half of it.

Photograph 2015 · Vuong Tri Binh · CC BY-SA 4.0 · the photographer records it as a shrine on Công nữ Ngọc Hoa street

On 13 February 2004 Hội An gave her name to a street in the old quarter, running 300 metres from the Chùa Cầu canal to the junction of Hùng Vương and Trần Hưng Đạo. In 2023 the Hanoi Opera House staged an opera named after her. Artists have drawn the story as a comic too.

Photograph, October 2012 · Masoud Akbari · CC BY-SA 3.0

What gets restaged is the wedding. Not what came after it: twenty-six years of bookkeeping in a distant city, and three graves at the edge of town.