Ocean Migration: The Ivory Trade in a Closed Japan

Ivory bangles in India, friezes around doorways in Sri Lanka, wedding necklaces in Nepal, ivory batons in China, netsuke in Japan, or dagger and kris hilts in Southeast Asia; ivory was part of the cultural landscape of Asia.  Interest in ivory connected the Imperial courts of China with the deepest jungles of Indonesia.  Elephants are found in parts of Africa, South, and Southeast Asia.  Even today, their migration patterns are little understood, but are generally believed to be land based.  Nevertheless, the Japanese archipelago where there were no elephants was one of the biggest consumers of ivory in the early modern period. Significantly, this trade increased in the period when Japan was theoretically “closed” to the outside world and when its citizens were forbidden from traveling abroad. During the Edo period commercial arrangements with the Dutch East India Company and the later involvement of Chinese traders brought ivory to Japan in larger quantities than ever before.  In this paper East India Company documents will be supplemented by primary source and visual documents to show how the ivory trade connected a geographically and politically isolated Japan to a much wider maritime world, and the effects of this trade upon its material culture.