Asia or even from India, and manufactured goods from China, such as silks, porcelains, books, manuscripts, paintings, and copper cash. The last loomed largest in bulk and value, because from the thirteenth century on, money increasingly replaced rice and cloth as the chief medium for exchange in Japan, and the Japanese depended almost entirely on China as the source for their currency.
In the early feudal period, Japanese exports were limited for the most part to raw goods, such as sulphur, lumber, gold, pearls, mercury, and mother of pearl. However, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Japan itself was exporting large quantities of manufactured goods to China and the continent. Chief among these were swords and painted folding fans and screens. Folding fans and screens apparently were inventions of either the Koreans or the Japanese and were highly prized in China. The curved swords of medieval Japan, made of the finest laminated steel and unexcelled even by the famous blades of Damascus or Toledo, were in great demand throughout East Asia and were exported by the thousands.
In the early days, the Koreans were the chief mariners and traders in the waters between Japan and the continent, but slowly the Japanese themselves took to the sea. In the late eleventh century, Japanese traders were crossing to Korea; in the twelfth, some were venturing as far as China; and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they were beginning to dominate the shipping and commerce of the whole East China Sea.
Various groups in Japan participated in this lucrative trade with the continent. As mentioned previously,