Japan and the Japanese

'
214 JAPAN. A. D. 1C42 1690.
twenty thousand dollars. All the goods of any one year's importation,
remaining after that amount had been realized, were to lay over
till the next annual sale. At the same time, the annual export of
copper was limited to twenty-five thousand piculs ; and so matters
stood at the time of Kiimpfer's visit.
The Chinese trade had meanwhile gone on increasing " to that
degree" we quote again from Kiimpfer "as to make the suspicious
and circumspect Japanese extremely jealous of them. In
the years 1683 and 1684, there arrived at Nagasaki, in each year,
at least two hundred junks, every junk with not less than fit'tj
people on board, making for each year more than ten thousand Chinese
visitors." Nor was it trade alone that drew the Chinese
thither. In China, the women, except those of servile condition,
are kept in perfect seclusion. No man sees even the woman he ib
to marry, till she has actually become his wife; and courtesanship is
strictly forbidden and punished. The case, as we have seen, is
widely different in Japan, and numerous young and wealthy Chinese
were attracted to Nagasaki, " purely for their pleasure," as Kiimpfer
observes, " and to spend some part of their money with Japanese
wenches, which proved very beneficial to that town," truly a very
mercantile view of the matter !
" Not only did this increasing number of Chinese visitors excite
jealousy ; but what still more aroused the suspicion of the Japanese
was, that the Jesuits, having gained the favor of the then reigning
monarch of China, [the celebrated Kanghi,] with the liberty of
preaching and propagating their religion in all parts of the empire,
some tracts and books, which the Jesuit fathers had found the
means to print in China, in Chinese characters, were brought over
to Japan among other Chinese books, and sold privately, which
made the Japanese, apprehensive that by this means the Catholic
religion, which had been exterminated with so much trouble and
the loss of so many thousand persons, might be revived again in the
country " And they even suspected that the importers of these
books, if not actual converts, were at least favorers of the Catholic
doctrine.
These reasons combined to produce, in 1684, at the same time
with th. restrictions placed upon the Dutch, an edict, by which the
Chinese were limited to an annual importation, double the value