The Merchants - Everyday Life in Traditional Japan - page 94

5
The Merchants
In the previous chapter it was pointed out how many tradesmen, from being largely inde-
pendent, producing their goods to order and selling them in their own workshops, became
mere paid workers for merchant-houses. Throughout the Tokugawa period merchants were
disliked and increasingly feared by the authorities. Originally the merchant was put at the
bottom of the class system because he was considered a parasite, adding nothing to the eco-
nomy: it was merely by the handling of goods and produce that were the fruit of another's
toil that he received money and so made his livelihood. Nevertheless, the merchant class
rose to a position of ever-greater influence and power as time went on, symptomatic of
the change from a feudal to a commercial society. As the merchants flourished, so many
samurai becameincreasinglyimpoverished,andasbothlivedintowns,themoneyedtraders
exerted more and more influence on the samurai, partly through intermarriage and partly
through a more materialistic view of life, some samurai even selling their status for money.
A useful introduction to an account of how the merchants operated will be a description
of the coinage ( 55 ) , which was fairly intricate, since it involved the use of four metals, gold,
silver,copper,andiron.Complicationsarosefromtimetotimefollowingeffortsbythecent-
ral government to improve the economy by debasing or improving the content of the coin-
age, which was not even uniform over the whole country, gold forming the currency in Edo,
while Osaka and Kyoto used silver. Copper, however, was everywhere in use, although it
was sometimes replaced by iron or brass.
Startingfromtheunitoflowestvalue,the zeni wasacircularcoppercoinaboutoneinch
in diameter with a quarter-inch square hole in the center. These were first made in Japan in
1636; up to then coins minted in China or even in Korea or Annam had been current. One
zeni couldbuysuchthingsasacupofteaorarestatawaysidestall( 54 );butveryoftenthey
were strung together with a strand of hemp through the central holes to make a “string of
cash.” These were of two sizes, one with a nominal 100 coins, and the other with a nominal
1,000.Thesefigureshadbeentheactualnumberbefore1636,butsince96ofthenewJapan-
ese coins had been declared equivalent to 100 of the old Chinese ones, the custom arose in
most districts of having strings of 96 and 960 respectively. The 1,000 string was equivalent
in value to a rectangular gold coin, 0.7 by 0.4 inch, known as ichibu kin,