‘… being the rage for a season’: Booms for imported commodities in treaty ports in Japan, 1850s–1870s

This article is a case study on international migration and the importing of material culture from abroad. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan, after some 200 years of national seclusion, was forced by western powers to open itself to international exchange. International migrants and overseas culture impacted on Japanese society and the lives of ordinary individuals. One response of ordinary Japanese to contact with imported material culture was booms for particular commodities. This article examines Japanese interest in overseas rats, pigs and rabbits, delineating how booms for these commodities brought to the fore important social, economic and political dynamics in the conflicted milieu of newly opened Japan. Issues of socio-economic class, individual agency and colonial aggrandizement were at play in Japanese interest in these innocuous imports.