- Japanese: 新潟市 (Niigata-shi)
Niigata is the capital city of Niigata prefecture, and has a long history as a significant port town on the Sea of Japan coast. It is situated at the mouth of the Shinano River, and faces Sado Island (Sado-ga-shima) across the Sado Strait.
During the Edo period, Niigata was the chief economic center of Nagaoka han, Echigo province, and a key port along the kitamaebune or nishi mawari kôro ("western sea circuit") trade route connecting Hokkaidô and the Sea of Japan coast to the Inland Sea and Osaka. Primarily a merchant city, Niigata lacked a castle, and a magistrates' office was the chief site of samurai activity. The city saw much cultural activity, including theater, sumo, and festivals, and emerged as a major site, famous throughout the realm, of prostitution.
As early as the late 17th century, Niigata played a key role in the transportation of rice paid in taxes from Hokuriku and Tôhoku domains to the shogunate storehouses at Osaka. The business of the rice trade fluctuated, and at one time in the 18th century, the port became silted up and too shallow for the large tax-rice ships. However, by the beginning of the 19th century, as many as 2,000 vessels might visit Niigata in a year, carrying not only tax rice, but a wide variety of other goods, including marine products from Ezo, sugar, Chinese medicine, and Ryukyuan red ink. For a number of years in the 1820s to early 1840s, ships sponsored by Satsuma han (including, chiefly, ones run by the Hamazaki family) brought sugar, sweet potatoes, and perhaps various Chinese goods, to Niigata to trade for cinnabar and medicinal goods. Merchants of the city paid taxes to the town office (machi kaisho), which was run by elders known as kendan and chôrô, who then conveyed the tax payments to the domainal authorities in Nagaoka. As in many domains, towards the end of the Edo period, the domain authorities fell into severe debt; in Nagaoka, efforts to alleviate these financial difficulties included forcing merchants to give loans to the authorities, sometimes amounting to as much as tens of thousands of ryô at a time.
The shogunate, under rôjû Mizuno Tadakuni, seeking to exert greater control over domestic and foreign trade, added the port of Niigata and the neighboring village of Niigata-hama to the set of cities under direct shogunate control in 1843, setting the stage for it to become opened to foreign trade as a treaty port in the 1850s.
References
- Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement, Harvard University Press (2009), 139.
- Amy Stanley, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, UC Press (2012), 111-133.