From Peril to Profit: Opium in Late-Edo to Meiji Eyes
From Peril to Profit: Opium in Late-Edo to Meiji Eyes
This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century Japan. It notes that the Tokugawa and Meiji regimes, both before and after 1868, enjoyed almost total success at controlling opium within Japan's borders, and both employed this control to enhance state consolidation and centralization of power. The chapter notes that Japan also established an opium regime in China and sold refined narcotics, doing so in the face of ever-mounting Chinese resistance and international censure. It furthermore explores the historical origins of Japanese involvement in the opium trade by examining changing Japanese views of opium use in Qing China. The chapter demonstrates how the mechanisms of sakoku furthered political consolidation in Tokugawa Japan, and argues that Meiji Japan used opium to move away from being a co-victim of Western imperialism to become a co-predator in China.
Keywords: Japan, Tokugawa regime, Meiji regime, opium, refined narcotics, opium trade, Qing China, Western imperialism
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
