S. Gay
Kamakura emerged from about the same time. Excavations have revealed that improvements to the
city’s long, shallow beach supported by the regent Yasutoki included the construction of two small
artificial islands and stone bulkheads still visible today; this created a safe, convenient harbor for
trading ships as evidenced by the Chinese ceramics found among the city’s excavated objects. As a
result of the abundance of the latter, it is now thought that the 1254 shogunal order prohibiting
more than five Chinese ships in harbor was intended to limit unofficial trade in Kamakura, not
Hakata, as previously assumed. The 1254 ruling may also be taken as a converse indication of thriv-
ing trade—namely, that more than five Chinese ships could be found berthed in Kamakura’s harbor.
The city’s population growth can be seen further in the 1265 shogunal decree both prohibiting the
incursion of houses onto public streets and permitting the establishment of seven new neighbor-
hoods for townspeople that would become the city’s commercial center. Also much studied by
archeologists are Kamakura’s dramatic “cut- throughs” (kiritōshi), roads built through the rocky hills
around the city during Yasutoki’s rule and thereafter. Some linked the city with the outside world
while others integrated areas of the city previously isolated by hills, thus creating a cohesive metrop-
olis. While serving a military purpose, the roads out of the city also allowed participation in land-
based regional trade, previously limited to small coastal roads.^17
During the fourteenth century military upheaval, Kamakura suffered some damage but,
despite the demise of its own shogunate, revived soon after when the new Kyoto- based
Muromachi shogunate established a deputyship in Kamakura to keep an eye on eastern- country
warriors. Commerce and Zen continued to thrive as well. Archeology has helped bring the com-
mercial sector of medieval Kamakura to life; we can now appreciate the city as one of Japan’s
major regional trade nodes, including even trade with China.
Amid this scholarly recognition of the local and incorporation of archeological evidence, to
understand the reach of medieval commerce we must also consider one more factor: networks of
merchants who transcended single locales. Some of these were individually itinerating and others
were affiliated with one another across regions by product and transport systems. The trans-
regional circulation of goods was dependent upon such networks. Two such groups that func-
tioned as links between cities and regions add geographical breadth to our picture of medieval
commerce: the itinerating Ise and Kumano merchants, and the Ōyamazaki lamp oil merchants.
The former traversed multiple provinces of central- east Japan, starting as transporters of goods
from the shrines’ far- flung estates and evolving into merchants dealing in a range of goods while
enjoying the prestige and protection of two major shrines. The lamp oil merchants were an
important success story in the trans- regional economy of western Japan from Kyoto to Kyushu.^18
Theirs was a winning combination: high- demand commodity, strategically located base on the
approach to Kyoto from the Inland Sea, and shrine protection allowing them valuable exemp-
tions on tolls and other taxes. In the thirteenth century they moved beyond their base near Kyoto
and spread across the Inland Sea, pulling merchants from other locales into their organization.
The experience of these two networks of medieval merchants shows how medieval commerce
functioned not only locally but trans- regionally and with great consistency over a long period
of time.
As these studies of towns, roads, and merchant groups demonstrate, however, one challenge
of medieval history remains from a half century ago: grasping the big picture. Scholars neces-
sarily study particular areas or groups and their conclusions reflect that particularity. It is the rare
historian indeed who can synthesize the massive, detailed evidence from multiple excavations
with textual sources into a comprehensive picture of medieval commerce and towns.