The technical stimulus for Japanese domestic production of this product came instead from Koreans, who were brought to Japan to teach Japanese how to raise the cotton plant and then weave cotton cloth. Cotton was grown throughout the region to the west of Osaka. Also, 60 to 70% of the arable land to the east of the city was turned into cotton fields, and as many as half of the rice paddies in this region were also converted into rice fields. The raw cotton and ginned cotton were sold to urban wholesalers or cotton dealers based in Osaka, while peasant women wove cotton cloth by the use of coarse looms. Half of the population of the town of Hirano-that is, half of 10,686 registered residents-were engaged in cotton production or its related trades. So great was the production of cotton that one wholesaler in the city of Sakai estimated that he annually dealt with not less than 500,000 bolts of cotton cloth.

     More even than in the case of sugar and silk production, this cotton industry proved to be a success at import substitution. By 1804, Japan imported a mere 384 bolts of Chinese cotton cloth. I hope, then, my case is clear: the so-called policy of national seclusion had the effect, partly intended, of forcing the Japanese to find replacements for their expensive imports. The production of Japanese domestic alternatives to Chinese manufactures would later bring Japanese manufactures into sharp competition with Chinese products. In the seventeenth century, however, that competition would remain two or more centuries away.

      Instead, the last third of this century saw the establishment of a new kind of Chinese merchant network which would dominate East Asian waters up to the end of the nineteenth century. This claim would seem to fly in the face of actual Chinese policy and practice, although the Chinese "seclusion policy" from 1661 to 1683 was nowhere as long-lived or as strong as the two centuries of Tokugawa exclusion, it nonetheless proved far more effective than any of the earlier Ming bans and the number of boats leaving China for Nagasaki fell greatly.

     Yet such a perspective assumes that all so-called Chinese ships coming to Japan had to leave from the China mainland. Once we include in the figures of Chinese boats arriving at Nagasaki those Chinese boats which originated instead from Taiwan, Tokin, and southeast Asia, the figures are strikingly different. Throughout all the 24 years of the Qing ban on overseas trade, these overseas Chinese merchants controlled 62% of Japan's export trade, in contrast to 38% for the Dutch.