This book attempts to get at the fact that, as the title conveys, sugar from Amami Oshima enriched the finances of the Satsuma clan.
The author, Shuzo Ohe, is said to be related to the Tabata family, which has been involved in sugar production on Amami Oshima for generations as a descendant of the Lyukyu Kingdom. Therefore, while this book focuses on the influence of the Satsuma clan's finances on the Meiji Restoration, it can also be seen as a family history that attempts to depict the origins of its own family. The composition of the book is as follows.
Chapter 1, 'The Satsuma clan vs. Amami Oshima' examines the process of Amami Oshima, which once belonged to the Ryukyu Kingdom, being incorporated into the Japanese territory of the Satsuma clan, citing the Tabata family. Chapter 2, 'Tokugawa Shogunate vs. the Satsuma Clan', focuses on sugar-related policies to understand the position of Amami Oshima, which was incorporated into the Satsuma clan. Chapter 3, 'The end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, why was Japan not colonised?', points out that the military power of the Satsuma clan at the end of the Shogunate derived from the revenue obtained from sugar in Amami Oshima. Chapter 4, 'Amami sugar brought about the Meiji Restoration', traces the actual construction of the Satsuma clan's military power at the end of the Edo period.
Throughout the book, the auther's focus is on the finances of the Satsuma clan, which have been kept under wraps. However, the financial documents of the Satsuma clan, which were supposed to be the 'key', were burnt by Ohyama Tsunayoshi, the Kagoshima prefectural governor in the early Meiji era and others. So how can Amami Oshima's sugar be traced as the 'Satsuma clan's hidden gold vein'? I will leave that to this book.
This is a departure from the subject of this book, but the author says that his speciality is 'distillation engineering in chemical engineering'. Amami Oshima is famous for brown sugar shochu, which is distilled from brown sugar made from sugar cane. The book refers to a list of items presented by Tametoshi-saiku, head of the Tabata family, when he visited the clan office at Kagoshima in 1687 (p.140), when Shimazu Tsunataka was the head of the Satsuma Clan. In the list, the word 'shochu' can be found, but the raw material is unknown. Was it shochu made from sugar cane? It would be interesting to know when the rare and expensive sugar that enriched the finances of the Satsuma Clan was also used as a raw material for shochu.
