Archival research on correspondences of an Ise merchant Nagai family: arrangement, preservation, disclosure and building infrastructure for further research

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The aims of this project are: (1) arrangement and preservation of unprocessed correspondences from the Edo office of the Nagai family, a famous Ise (Matsuzaka) merchant company of the Tokugawa period; (2) structural analysis of those correspondences and building infrastructure for further research. During the two preliminary surveys and ten main surveys at Sekisui Museum, the repository of the papers, we arranged and made catalogs of more than twelve hundreds of the correspondences, and processed them for preservation and making available to the public. As a result of the structural analysis of the correspondences, we discovered that the most of them were from the Edo office, but it also includes various kinds of papers created or received at Matsuzaka headquarters office. We found these records valuable as they reveal the actual transactions and relationships about the business of the Nagai family.