Iwanai

Iwanai stood on the western coast of Ezo within an older Ainu world of coastal settlement and exchange. Japanese commercial institutions expanded there through the Matsumae trading system. In 1751 Okada Yazaemon of the Ōmi merchant house Ebisuya became contractor for the Iwanai and Furuu trading districts. The trading headquarters he established was called an unjōya, linking merchants' business with the administration of exchange.

The fisheries drew the locality into the wider commerce of the Japan Sea coast. Merchants sought northern marine products, while the Ainu encountered an increasingly unequal system of controlled trade and labour. Iwanai's eighteenth-century institutional beginnings therefore belonged to the growth of a commercial fishery on an already inhabited shore. Boats carried products to distant markets, and the trading station concentrated dealings that had formerly depended on older local relationships.