Ryōichirō Arai

Who They Were

Arai Ryōichirō (新井領一郎) was a Japanese businessman who spent most of his working life in the United States, building commercial bridges between the two countries in the years after Japan opened to foreign trade. He was born on 31 August 1855 in Kiryū, a town in the silk-producing region of Kōzuke Province, in the mountains north of Edo. He died on 10 April 1939 in Riverside, in the American state of California, at the age of eighty-three.

His career spanned two Japanese eras and two continents. He was born in the Edo period (1603–1868), under the era name Ansei (安政), the first year of that era — a time when Japan was still governed by the Tokugawa shogunate and had only just begun to sign treaties with Western powers. By the time he died, Japan was an industrialising empire and the United States was one of its largest trading partners. Arai was one of the men who helped make that transition happen, above all in silk.

Life and Career

Arai was born in Kiryū, a centre of silk textile production. Silk was the single most valuable Japanese export of the late nineteenth century, and the raw material for it — silkworm cocoons and reeled silk thread — came from exactly the kind of provincial town where he grew up. That background gave him practical knowledge of the trade that few of his contemporaries in either country possessed.

He travelled to the United States and settled there, working as a businessman rather than as a government official. His work centred on the silk trade, the channel through which Japanese producers sold to American mills and American buyers gained access to Japanese supply. He was active in this field during the decades when Japanese silk was becoming a major presence in the American market, a period that ran from the 1870s into the early twentieth century.

He lived long enough to see the relationship he had helped build become one of the most important commercial links either country had. He died in Riverside, California, in 1939, far from the town where he was born.

Why They Matter

Japan's modernisation in the Meiji period (1868–1912) depended on exports. The country had few natural resources and needed foreign currency to buy machinery, ships and weapons. Silk was the answer: it was light, valuable, and in demand in Europe and America, and Japan could produce it in large quantities. The men who sold Japanese silk abroad were therefore not peripheral figures. They were the ones who turned a domestic craft into a national industry.

Arai was one of those men. He worked specifically on the United States side of the trade, which was the market that mattered most to Japanese exporters. By operating as a businessman rather than a diplomat, he did something that official channels could not: he built personal, commercial relationships with American buyers and manufacturers, and he made Japanese silk a familiar product in American mills.

He also belongs to a broader story about Japanese people in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was not a labourer or a student but a merchant operating at the top of his industry, and he spent most of his adult life in the United States. His career shows that Japanese–American contact in that period was not only about immigration and exclusion, but also about trade, credit and long-term business partnership.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 新井領一郎.

• Kana reading: あらい りょういちろう
• Romaji: Arai Ryōichirō

The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese. Breaking the name down character by character:

新 — read here as ara. It means "new". On its own it is a very common kanji, read atarashii when it stands alone as an adjective, or shin in compounds such as 新聞 (shinbun, newspaper).

井 — read here as i. It means "well", in the sense of a water well. Combined with 新, the two characters form the surname 新井, literally "new well". Surnames of this type, built from ordinary landscape words, are extremely common in Japan.

領 — read here as ryō. It means "territory", "domain" or "to hold/possess". It appears in words such as 領土 (ryōdo, territory) and 大統領 (daitōryō, president).

一 — read here as ichi. It means "one". It is one of the simplest and most frequently used kanji in the language.

郎 — read here as rō. It is a suffix used in male given names, historically carrying the sense of "young man" or "son". It appears in a great many Japanese male names, and it is the reason the final element is lengthened: 一郎 is Ichirō, not Ichi plus a separate word.

So the given name 領一郎, Ryōichirō, is built from "territory" plus "one" plus the masculine name-ending 郎. The full name is therefore Arai Ryōichirō — surname first in Japanese order, given name last.

Legacy

Arai's legacy is bound up with the silk trade he spent his life working in. For decades, Japanese raw silk was the country's leading export, and the United States was its leading customer. That trade paid for much of Japan's early industrial imports, and it was sustained by merchants who understood both sides of the Pacific.

He died in Riverside, California, in 1939, having lived through the entire arc of Japan's emergence as a modern trading nation — from the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, through the Meiji transformation, to the eve of the Second World War. His name survives chiefly in the record of Japanese–American commercial relations, as one of the businessmen who made Japanese silk an American commonplace.