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 trade licensed under the Tokugawa shogunate. Members of the Chaya family, they were also centrally involved in the country's production and trade in textiles.

Chaya Shirōjirō Kiyonobu (1545-1596)

Chaya Shirōjirō Kiyonobu (1545-1596), likely the first of the line, was a ronin of the Nakajima family, crippled in the wars of the Sengoku period, who was adopted into the Chaya family, and established a humble business in Kyoto making drapes. He developed a strong business relationship with one of his clients, Matsudaira Hirotada, and later sent his son Chaya Shirōjirō Kiyotada (1584-1603) to Mikawa province to serve as a squire to Hirotada's son, now known as Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Kiyonobu thus became one of the primary suppliers of the Tokugawa family, and quickly came into great wealth and influence in Kyoto. He accompanied Ieyasu in battle, at both the Mikatagahara (1573), and served him in other ways, as an intelligence agent in Kyoto and in secretly transporting messages and goods for Ieyasu during the time when Toyotomi Hideyoshi held power. Chaya was supposedly the one who informed Ieyasu of Oda Nobunaga's death in 1582, and thus allowed him to escape the forces of Akechi Mitsuhide and Hideyoshi, who seized power in the aftermath.

He is said to have helped design the layout of the city of Edo, and for his last year or so of life, did not leave Ieyasu's side. He repeatedly refused formal posts as governor of various Tokugawa lands, insisting that he was not a soldier.

Chaya Shirōjirō Kiyotada (1584-1603)

Following his death in 1596, Kiyonobu's son Kiyotada took over the family business, and, having already served for a time as Ieyasu's squire, succeeded his father in his relationship with the Tokugawa lord. Kiyotada fought at Sekigahara (1600), but died young, in 1603, at the age of nineteen.

Chaya Shirōjirō Kiyotsugu (1584-1622)

Thus, with the patronage of the shogunate behind them, the remaining brothers Kiyotsugu (1584-1622), Michizumi, and Nobumune took over the Chaya family business, worked to monopolize the trade in raw silk, and served as official suppliers of a variety of goods to the shogunate. Kiyotsugu was assigned by Ieyasu to help oversee shogunal operations at the formal trading post in Nagasaki, where he could keep an eye on the foreign traders and Christian missionaries, while working to his own commercial benefit as well.

A friend of artist Honami Kōetsu, Kiyotsugu was active socially in the Kyoto art world, and was known as both a patron of the arts in general, and a collector of tea bowls and other implements of the Japanese tea ceremony.

Beginning in 1612, the family obtained official licenses (shuin) from the shogunate to outfit the ships trading with Annam (present-day Vietnam); these merchant vessels thus came to be known as chaya-sen (茶屋船, "Chaya ships").

Chaya Shirōjirō Kagayoshi and Koshirō Munekiyo, heads of the family several generations later, continued to serve the shogunate, and expanded the family business, establishing branches in Kii and Owari provinces.

Notes and references

• Some of the material contained here is derived from that of the corresponding article on the Japanese Wikipedia.
• Chaya Shirōjirō in Frederic, Louis (2002). Japan Encyclopedia. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Sansom, George (1963). "A History of Japan: 1615-1867." Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.