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Oura Kei (1828-1884)
Sep. 29th, 2023 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiOura Kei, or “Oura O-Kei,” as she is often called with the archaic female honorific, was born in Nagasaki in 1828, the daughter of a prosperous oil merchant. She grew up in the uniquely international atmosphere of what was then Japan’s only trading port. Disaster descended when she was sixteen: shortly after her father’s death, a fire swept through Nagasaki and destroyed the Oura store among many others. O-Kei was determined to rebuild the business. At eighteen she married Kojiro, a landowner’s son from nearby Amakusa, adopting him into the Oura name rather than taking his; however, it only took her six months (in some accounts, more like six hours) to decide he was no more than a drag on the business. She paid him off and sent him back to his family, remaining single thereafter for the rest of her life.
Her first international venture was an attempt to export kimonos through the Dutch, which failed. Some accounts have her traveling on a Dutch ship to Shanghai and India when she was twenty, discovering possible markets for Japanese tea, but this is suspected to be apocryphal. The Second Opium War of 1853 reduced the availability of Chinese tea and provided a business opportunity for the Japanese. O-Kei acquired samples of Ureshino tea from Saga and tasked the German merchant Carl Julius Textor with them, asking him to distribute them in Britain, the US, and the Arab world. This paid off three years later, when the English merchant William Alt appeared in Nagasaki with sample in hand and placed an absurdly large order.
O-Kei took it on. The Ureshino area couldn’t possibly produce enough tea to fill the bill, so she traveled all around Kyushu gathering the goods (at the time, tea production was often a sideline for farming families rather than a discrete industry). She came up with ten thousand kin, or about nine tons of tea, for Alt, and made her name as a tea merchant.
Her business flourished in the 1860s, the peak era of Nagasaki tea exporting, a time when some 240 tons of tea were leaving Japan every year. O-Kei set up her own tea fields and processing plant. Her tea business became a gathering place for activists working to take down the old Shogunate, who used her as a go-between for arms purchases from Western merchants; their numbers included Katsu Kaishu, Okuma Shigenobu, Matsukata Masayoshi (grandfather of Haru M. Reischauer), Mutsu Munemitsu (husband of Mutsu Ryoko), and Sakamoto Ryoma.
After the Meiji Restoration, O-Kei’s business shrank as other ports such as Yokohama and Kobe stole Nagasaki’s glory. In 1871 she was swindled by Toyama Kazuya, a friend of a friend who used her as a guarantor for a tobacco deal with the British and ran off with the loot; she spent years diligently repaying the debt. In 1879, when Ulysses S. Grant visited Nagasaki, she was the only woman to receive a formal invitation as a guest of the United States government aboard his ship.
She died in 1884, one week after being presented with a governmental award for her contributions to the tea industry in Japan.
Sources
Ishii, Nakae
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/earns/ourakei.html
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/earns/althouse.html Informative articles from an English-language journal on Nagasaki, recommended.
http://www.city.nagasaki.lg.jp/nagazine/hakken0405/index.html Japanese article in three parts on Oura Kei’s life, with numerous photos of relevant places.
https://kyusyu-manga.azusashoin.com/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%8C%B6%E8%BC%B8%E5%87%BA%E8%B2%BF%E6%98%93%E3%81%AE%E5%85%88%E9%A7%86%E8%80%85%E3%80%80%E5%A4%A7%E6%B5%A6%E6%85%B6/ Short, but adorable, Japanese-language manga excerpt.
Her first international venture was an attempt to export kimonos through the Dutch, which failed. Some accounts have her traveling on a Dutch ship to Shanghai and India when she was twenty, discovering possible markets for Japanese tea, but this is suspected to be apocryphal. The Second Opium War of 1853 reduced the availability of Chinese tea and provided a business opportunity for the Japanese. O-Kei acquired samples of Ureshino tea from Saga and tasked the German merchant Carl Julius Textor with them, asking him to distribute them in Britain, the US, and the Arab world. This paid off three years later, when the English merchant William Alt appeared in Nagasaki with sample in hand and placed an absurdly large order.
O-Kei took it on. The Ureshino area couldn’t possibly produce enough tea to fill the bill, so she traveled all around Kyushu gathering the goods (at the time, tea production was often a sideline for farming families rather than a discrete industry). She came up with ten thousand kin, or about nine tons of tea, for Alt, and made her name as a tea merchant.
Her business flourished in the 1860s, the peak era of Nagasaki tea exporting, a time when some 240 tons of tea were leaving Japan every year. O-Kei set up her own tea fields and processing plant. Her tea business became a gathering place for activists working to take down the old Shogunate, who used her as a go-between for arms purchases from Western merchants; their numbers included Katsu Kaishu, Okuma Shigenobu, Matsukata Masayoshi (grandfather of Haru M. Reischauer), Mutsu Munemitsu (husband of Mutsu Ryoko), and Sakamoto Ryoma.
After the Meiji Restoration, O-Kei’s business shrank as other ports such as Yokohama and Kobe stole Nagasaki’s glory. In 1871 she was swindled by Toyama Kazuya, a friend of a friend who used her as a guarantor for a tobacco deal with the British and ran off with the loot; she spent years diligently repaying the debt. In 1879, when Ulysses S. Grant visited Nagasaki, she was the only woman to receive a formal invitation as a guest of the United States government aboard his ship.
She died in 1884, one week after being presented with a governmental award for her contributions to the tea industry in Japan.
Sources
Ishii, Nakae
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/earns/ourakei.html
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/earns/althouse.html Informative articles from an English-language journal on Nagasaki, recommended.
http://www.city.nagasaki.lg.jp/nagazine/hakken0405/index.html Japanese article in three parts on Oura Kei’s life, with numerous photos of relevant places.
https://kyusyu-manga.azusashoin.com/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%8C%B6%E8%BC%B8%E5%87%BA%E8%B2%BF%E6%98%93%E3%81%AE%E5%85%88%E9%A7%86%E8%80%85%E3%80%80%E5%A4%A7%E6%B5%A6%E6%85%B6/ Short, but adorable, Japanese-language manga excerpt.
