Bruce --
During the 18th century, the Satsuma smuggled more goods through Ryukyus than they paid in taxes to Tokugawa. See Donald Keene, "The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830" (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, revised edition, 1969).
Some folks in Northern Japan apparently smuggled nearly as much; their trading partners included the Cossacks and Russians.
In Korea, big smuggling ports included Pusan. Products included ginseng. Taipei was important, too.
Try Googling < smuggling Tokugawa Russia> , < smuggling Satsuma Japan > , and so on.
I haven't read them, but articles that turn up include the following:
The Satsuma-Ryukyu Trade and the Tokugawa Seclusion Policy
Robert K. Sakai
Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (May, 1964), pp. 391-403
doi:10.2307/2050758
Some Aspects of Japan Sea Shipping and Trade in the Tokugawa Period, 1603-1867
Robert G. Flershem
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 110, No. 3 (Jun. 27, 1966), pp. 182-226
and
http://www.aasianst.org/absts/2004ab...n/sessions.htm
QUOTE
Where Were the Pirates? The Significance of Satsuma’s Commercial Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japanese Foreign Relations
Robert Hellyer, Allegheny College
Nineteenth-century Japan is usually portrayed as plagued by poor coastal defenses and widespread political and social unrest, factors that contributed to the profound political change of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Yet while Japan was certainly weak and disunited, it was remarkably free of piracy, a scourge that afflicted the Chinese coastline in the same period. Why was this case?
Historians normally explore such defensive and foreign policy questions by examining the actions of the central authority, the Tokugawa shogunate. This paper challenges this focus on central agency and instead suggests that the Satsuma domain played a crucial foreign relations role, as illustrated by its commercial networks that prevented the rise of coastal piracy.
In the early nineteenth century, Satsuma developed a broad commercial network by first placing coastal smuggling with Chinese merchant vessels under its direct control, thereby providing smugglers a "legitimate" outlet that mitigated their transformation into pirates. In subsequent decades, Satsuma further expanded this network by forming new domestic connections and by exploring commercial ties with Asian and Western states. All told, Satsuma’s commercial activities demonstrate that the domain often exercised more control over foreign trade and coastal defense than the shogunate. In a broader sense, Satsuma’s key role in foreign relations also suggests new ways to explore the power relationships between domains and the shogunate that helped define the wider political culture of nineteenth-century Japan.
END QUOTE
Hellyer's dissertation is "A Tale of Two Domains: Satsuma, Tsushima and Foreign Relations in Late Edo Period Japan" (Stanford, 2001). You can usually buy recent dissertations in PDF format through University Microforms.