When early on in the 1900s Mitsui busan started to ship Japanese cotton yarn and cloth in China, particularly north China, it reduced the power of the Shanghai trading network. By 1904, 132,000 piculs were directly exported from Japan to North China treaty ports, in contrast to only 106,000 piculs to Shanghai. This North China trade was actually aided by Chinese importers based in North China ports, who upon purchasing Japanese cotton goods from Japanese exporters had direct access to Chinese handweavers. In 1914 then 64% of the sales of a major Japanese exporter to Tianjin, Shinsho yoko, went to three large Chinese import merchants there. This relationship was long-term, and so Japanese mills found a stable outlet for their production. From 1905, then, China became the largest importer of Japanese goods.

While it has been generally assumed that Japanese merchants dominated Japanese export trade after World War I, there is strong evidence to suggest that Chinese merchants in Japan revived their position after the war. In 1925, for instance, 56% of the exports from Osaka to North China were carried by Chinese merchants while their share of Osaka's trade with Shanghai remained small. Another group of Chinese merchants based in Kobe accounted for 41% of the Japanese export trade from Kobe to Hong Kong and southeast Asia. These Kobe merchants tended to work more independently of their home offices back in China or southeast Asia than did the overseas Chinese merchants in Osaka who had to make anticipatory purchases of Japanese cotton textiles on the advice of their main office back in North China. And when we enter the 1930s, even then Chinese merchants in Kobe remained among the biggest buyers of high quality, more variedly coloured cotton textiles. In the one case that has been studied, it was they who bought up most of the textile produced for the southeast Asian market.

     Another production sector of critical importance in the late nineteenth century export economy of Japan was that of marine products. Thanks to the remarkable survival of some account books from Chinese traders in Hakodate on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, we can see how another group of Chinese merchants survived at least until World War I as strong competitors to the Japanese in shipping Japanese goods to China. In 1858, attracted by the opening of the port of Hakodate, these Chinese traders first came to Hokkaido. Employed either as compradores of foreign factories at this port or as agents dispatched by wholesale dealers at Shanghai and Canton, they outnumbered the resident Westerners, diplomats and merchants, by 40 to 32.