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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
Whereas the famous silk weaving center of Kyoto known as Nishijin had just 31 weavers in the 1530s, by 1706 they numbered 2,000 and by 1730 their looms numbered over 7,000. Provincial centers for weaving and spinning silk emerged in Kanazaw, Fukui, and Gifu regions of Japan, with some of the high-class Kyoto silk cloth exported to Korea and Ryukyu Islands.

To counter this import of silk yarn and cloth, the Tokugawa government issued decrees calling for greater thrift and more domestic production. The first demand seems to have fallen on deaf ears, but not the second. For although it did not undertake extensive efforts for silk production as it did in the case of sugar, by the mid-eighteenth century this new machinery and know-how for making high quality white silk yarn had spread widely throughout the country. The most remarkable instance of such growth is that of the district of Kiryu in the hills north of Tokyo. At the end of the seventeenth century, this district had been just a local center of silk textile manufacture where only plain silk was woven. By 1722 a branch store of the wholesaler Mitsui-Echigoya opened in Kiryu. The following year a Kyoto artisan skilled at dying silk arrived at the invitation of local people to transfer his methods there. Similar transfer of Kyoto expertise occurred in 1733, when some artisans moved to Kiryu from the silkweaving district of Kyoto, the Nishijim area, after a fire there had destroyed 3,000 of its 7,000 high looms. In 1738 a new type of High Loom was brought there from Kyoto, and from 1743 it began to produce silk crepe, followed by thin gauze silk in 1745, twill weave gauze with scattered patterns in 1748, and thin silk gauze with delicate patterns in 1750. Locally devised inventions saw to improvements in the spinning wheel and, from 1783, in the use of water power to twist yarn. Its products were already well-known in Edo and Kyoto, when another fire in the Nishijin quarter drew more Kyoto artisans to its no longer isolated hills in the 1760s. In fact, its development into a silk-weaving center had a ripple-on effect, as the nearby areas of Ashikaga, Isezaki, and Hachioji saw the emergence of a complex organization for the making of silk. Even in these relatively slow developing areas, a clear division of labor was evident in sericulture, yarn production, weaving, and dying, all under a style of management distinct for manufacturing.

Finally, there is the case of cotton production. China had already seen a shift from the wearing of linen to cotton cloth between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Japan's imports of Chinese cotton remained low compared to silk, but had nonetheless increased enough in the mid-seventeenth century to frighten the shogunate: Japanese imports of Chinese cotton cloth from the Lower Yangtze delta rose from 2,170 bolts in 1641 to 7,145 bolts in 1650 and then to 7,329 bolts in 1711.

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