According to one recent estimate, total Japanese silver imports in the second half of the seventeenth century came to just half of its silver exports in the first half. Yet only in the 1660s did the Tokugawa shogunate take any action to alter the outflow of Japanese silver. The persistence of turbulent politics on the mainland of East Asia helps to explain a drop in silver exports during these decades from their heyday in the 1620s and 1630s. But between 1658 and 1665, Japan's silver exports almost doubled, alarming the shogunate into thinking that it was losing all the country's silver. Thus, in the last half of the 1660s, some three seclusion policy began, it directly intruded in the precious metals market. (*) It first sought to lower the price of silver by artificially restricting demand. It forced Japanese purchasers of Chinese silk to form merchant groups which made group rather than individual bids. Prices fell, but not as much as the government felt necessary. And so, it then lifted the ban on the export of gold and from 1668 banned the export of silver. When in 1671, it lifted the ban on silver exports, it allowed only the (* can't read), not the Dutch, to ship silver out.

     The government's attitude to the flight of precious metals is well captured by the comments made to it slightly later by the famous political adviser, Arai Hakuseki. He warned the shogunate that in letting so much precious metal leaving the country it was losing the nation's bones. (*) Three-quarters of the nation's silver supply and a quarter of its gold supply, he claimed, had left the country for useless items like silk and sugar. He also noted that the Chinese, after centuries of allowing their precious metals to leave the country, were trying to pull them back into their borders at the expense of Japan. With such a fear of losing control of the nation's wealth, the Tokugawa government then in the 1670s imposed a ceiling of 6,000 kanme on the value of Chinese imports and 3,000 kanme for Dutch imports. When 192 Chinese vessels arrived at Nagasaki in 1688, 75 of them were turned away. And so, from 1685 to 1697, Chinese merchants could export only an annual average of 1,150 kilogram of Japanese silver.

     The story of the decline in silver exports, however, is made more complex by the export of silver through routes other than Nagasaki. Since the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate, Japanese goods, including silver, regularly left the country from the domains of Tsushima and Satsuma. These daimyo domains in Western Japan had been accorded the legal privileges of being able to conduct officially authorized trade with, respectively, Korea and the Ryukyu Islands.