In 1871 Japan’s Meiji government established a new postal system that quickly expanded throughout the nation, linking even remote areas to regional and national centers. Modeled on the British post, Japan’s Meiji post came to offer to Japanese a variety of new services which marked this institution as distinctly different from the private courier companies (hikyakuya) of the Tokugawa period. This study argues that the success of Japan’s modern post was highly dependent on past practices and must be understood in the context of the steadily increasing demand for information and the limits of transmitting that information in the preceding era.

This study looks at Tokugawa communications in four ways: first, it surveys the origins and development of Tokugawa-era couriers revealing the dynamic growth of communications. At once expanding and extending the networks and also working within the constraints of the existing political system, some of these organizations survived into the Meiji period to contend with the new postal system. Second, it looks at the case of a Nagoya-based hikyakuya (Inokuchiya), which through its plentiful records shows in detail how couriers survived by linking themselves to multiple sources of power, both real and symbolic. Third, in arguing for the central role of letter writing in expanding the sense of “Japaneseness,” it looks at individual cases showing how letters helped forge important long-distance relationships and at the role played by letter-writing manuals in preparing a letter-writing public. Fourth and finally, this study focuses on the close of the Tokugawa period and early Meiji to show that, although impressive by any measure, the story of the modern Japanese post cannot be understood as a top-down government imposed initiative, but must also take into account the changing needs of the communicators, the courier companies struggling to survive, and the local leadership, who in becoming postmasters and transport agents, contributed their experience and personal wealth to the post and the nation.