Richard Cocks, English Merchant in Japan

Of the four European national groups trading in seventeenth-century Japan, the least successful were the English. Not only did the English merchants ultimately involve the East India Company in financial loss, but their stay in Japan was far shorter than the residence of their commercial rivals, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Dutch.

The Portuguese, for example, remained in Japan for almost a century until their expulsion in 1639, while the Dutch managed to cling tenaciously to their Japanese trading post throughout the country’s long period of self-imposed isolation, lasting until the middle of the nineteenth century. In contrast, the English traders stayed in Japan for a bare ten years, 1613-1623, and, when they were finally recalled, left behind a string of uncollected debts and broken promises.