THE CHINESE COMMUNITY in Japan in the Bakumatsu and early Meiji periods had its origins in two distinct sources. One was the survival, in tradition and to some extent in form, of the Chinese quarter (the Tōjin yashiki) and the Chinese guild of traders at Nagasaki. The Dutch presence and trade at Nagasaki during the sakoku period is well known outside Japan, but little is known about the Chinese. Yet the Chinese were the more important group in many ways. Chinese trade was more important in terms of the amounts involved and in the numbers of men and ships which took part. Up to the 1680s, hundreds of Chinese ships arrived at Nagasaki each year, and there was a large Chinese community established permanently on shore. From then onwards, it is true, the trade and numbers of the Chinese were both restricted, especially from the second decade of the eighteenth century, yet both still remained larger than those of the Dutch. The Dutch enclave at Nagasaki ended with the opening of the treaty ports to Western settlers in the 1850s and in particular with the Dutch treaty of January 1856. The old system of trade with China and the Chinese settlement at Nagasaki continued, however, into the new era.

The other source of the Chinese community in Japan in the later nineteenth century was as a by-product of those same treaties which swept away the old order for the Dutch settlement at Nagasaki. There was no formal treaty sanction which allowed the foreigners who were permitted to reside in Japan under the various treaties negotiated in the 1850s to bring in with them non-treaty country citizens as servants or as employees, but that did not prevent it happening. From the very first, many foreigners brought with them their Chinese servants to whom they had grown accustomed on the China coast. Even more important than the domestic servants were the clerks, warehousemen and other semi-skilled workers which trading firms brought with them. Most important of all, were the compradores, the skilled Chinese negotiators whom the China port merchants had grown accustomed to using as middle-men in most commercial transactions involving Chinese traders.