JAPAN: AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST^369market sugar privately. No more need to borrow. Satsuma was soon
producing one half the national sugar crop.^35
Meanwhile Satsuma had a privileged position in international
trade. In theory, only Chinese and Dutch vessels could come to
Japan, and then only to Nagasaki. But Satsuma was the effective
ruler of the nominally Chinese Ryukyu Islands, and this made
possible a lucrative smuggling operation bypassing the shogunate's
controls. Again, no need for credit: the merchants were glad to pay
cash for cheaper imports.
Unfortunately, these same imports hurt home industry, including
manufacture of cotton goods in Satsuma itself. "Of all things
Western, what do you dread most?" asked the Satsuma daimyd
Shimazu Nariakira of his councilors. European guns and ships, came
the answer. "No," said the daimyd. "It is cotton cloth. Unless we
begin preparing now, we shall soon be dependent on Westerners for
our clothing."^36 In an effort to prepare, the han began to distribute
better cotton seeds, purchased better spindles and looms (not yet
powered), built a manufactory near Kagoshima, and set unemployed
samurai to work there. The result: cotton goods costing half as
much as before.
At the same time, Satsuma began to invest in war and modernity.
This was a han with a disproportionate number of samurai, one in
three people as against a national average of one in seventeen. Idle
warriors were the makings of power; also of management; also of
trouble. Nariakira chose to focus on the first two. He built up the
army, bought foreign arms and vessels, and undertook a program of
economic development: a research center (the Shuseikan), an iron
foundry using a reverberatory furnace (the first in Japan), an arsenal,
a shipyard. In 1855, Satsuma was able to put a steam vessel into the
water. In 1867, it opened a mechanized cotton mill. Way to go!
A terrible irony lurked here. Satsuma, by its enterprise,
contributed not only to its own development but to that of Japan as
a whole. But then it turned against the new Japan. It was technicians
from Satsuma, often drawn from the lowest levels of samurai (thus
talent before birth), who staffed key positions in the national
government of the Meiji Restoration. But it was also Satsuma that
became a stronghold of reaction after 1870 and led a revolt of the
old order. All those samurai could not bear their eclipse by
commoners, the abandonment of old dress and ways, the usurpation
of their monopoly of war by general military conscription (1872). So