Richard Cocks

Richard Cocks was the manager of the English East India Company trading post in Hirado, Japan, from its creation in 1613 to its closure due to bankruptcy in 1623.

Richard began his career as an apprentice to William Hewett, cloth worker in London becoming a member of the Clothworkers' Company. It is known that from 1603 to 1608 he lived and traded at Bayonne in France, acting in the same time as intelligencer to Thomas Wilson, secretary to Lord Salisbury. Due to his experience of the cloth trade and knowledge of Spanish language he was finally employed in the service of the English East India Company. As a company's merchant he sailed on the Clove in 1611 under the command of John Saris charged with the establishing settlement in distant Japan.

Cocks remained in Japan as manager of the new established factory at Hirado, a small island off the west coast of Kyushu. He ran the factory for the next ten years, but without significant success. Despite that, his numerous letters (more than a hundred) on business make the Hirado factory one of the best documented enterprises in the early history of the company.

The main reason for failure lay in the unsuitability of cargoes brought from England and limited availability of silk to the English, which was a profitable merchandise on Japanese market. The first years in Japan he spent in organizing the factory and its sub-agencies at Kyoto, Sakai and Edo as well as in fitting out local junks for English voyages to mainland south-east Asia.

His attempts to establish direct English trade to China through mediation of Li Tan, head of the overseas Chinese community at Hirado also proved to be failure since Li Tan used the bribes for influential mandarins on the mainland for himself.

After the Hirado factory was closed in 1623, Cocks received an order to return in London to face examination by the company. He died during this trip, and was buried at sea in the southern Indian Ocean.

His diary which describes events of period between 1615 and 1622 serves as valuable source of information not only for English and other European activities in Japan but also for Japanese economic, political, and social conditions in the early Tokugawa period.