was a merchant and shipper of

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

.Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "''Chaya Shirōjirō''" in ; n.b., Louis-Frédéric is pseudonym of Louis-Frédéric Nussbaum, ''see'
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Authority File
. Along with the families of

Chaya Shirōjirō Chaya Shirōjirō (茶屋四郎次郎) was the name of a series of wealthy and influential Kyoto-based merchants who took part in the red seal ships, red-seal trade licensed under the Tokugawa shogunate. Members of the Chaya family, they were also c ...

and Gotō Shōzaburō, the Suminokura family, whose merchant enterprise Ryōi founded, represented one of the three chief merchant families in the city in this period.

Life and career

Ryōi was born into a branch family of physicians and moneylenders. Like many commoner merchants of the period, he later came to be known by a name related to his work — Suminokura, or "corner warehouse". Ryōi obtained a formal trade license, a '' shuinjō'', from

Toyotomi Hideyoshi , otherwise known as and , was a Japanese samurai and ''daimyō'' (feudal lord) of the late Sengoku period regarded as the second "Great Unifier" of Japan.Richard Holmes, The World Atlas of Warfare: Military Innovations that Changed the Cour ...

, and managed overseas trading operations, importing goods from southern Vietnam. After Hideyoshi's death in 1598, Ryōi became a trusted advisor and supplier to

Tokugawa Ieyasu was the founder and first ''shōgun'' of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, which ruled Japan from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. He was one of the three "Great Unifiers" of Japan, along with his former lord Oda Nobunaga and fellow ...

,Sansom, George. ''A History of Japan: 1615–1867'', p. 10. who became ''

shōgun , officially , was the title of the military dictators of Japan during most of the period spanning from 1185 to 1868. Nominally appointed by the Emperor, shoguns were usually the de facto rulers of the country, though during part of the Kamakur ...

'' in 1603, and continued his overseas operations, with a ''shuinjō'' granted by Ieyasu.Crawcour, E. S. (1968). "Changes in Commerce in the Tokugawa Period", in ''Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan'' ( John Whitney Hall and Marius Jansen, eds.), pp. 191–192. Between 1605 and 1611, he also played a major role in constructing canals and making the rivers of Kyoto more navigable, so as to better ship goods to, from, and within the city. These included the Tenryū, Takase, Fujigawa, and Hozu rivers; in exchange for his efforts, the Suminokura business was granted extended shipping rights within the city. Ryōi's sons Suminokura Genshi and Soan followed in their father's footsteps, and took over the family business after his death, enjoying considerable prosperity until the imposition of maritime restrictions by the shogunate in the mid-1630s, when trade with Vietnam came to an end.

Notes

References

* Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric and Käthe Roth. (2005)
''Japan encyclopedia''.
Cambridge:

Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retirem ...

.
OCLC 58053128
* Sansom, George (1963). "A History of Japan: 1615–1867". Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ; {{DEFAULTSORT:Suminokura, Ryoi 1554 births 1614 deaths 16th-century Japanese businesspeople 17th-century Japanese businesspeople