Men of Wealth by John T. Flynn

Author:John T. Flynn [John T. Flynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61016-054-4
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1941-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

After the Tokugawa Shogunate got under way that powerful social chemical—money—began its slow work. Very little at a time, but very surely, the old feudal system began to lose its vitality, indeed to lose its way. Little by little the money system and all that went with it—the capitalist system—began to trickle over Japanese society.

Gold and silver coins had begun to circulate around 1429—in the Muromachi period. Goto Mitsutsugu began to buy placer gold and gold bars and to mint them into coins. Daikakuya minted silver into coins about the same time. Both grew rich. Some others followed suit. Also Chinese copper coins circulated freely. But when Oda Nobunaga rose to power he put an end to the nondescript and miscellaneous issuance and circulation of coins and conferred upon Mitsutsugu and Daikakuya the monopoly privilege of coining gold and silver respectively, so that these men became among the richest in Japan. As in Europe, men who had goods or services to sell preferred to be paid in money. Money began to have an agio, or preference, over rice. By the middle of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a Japanese philosopher wrote:

The possession of gold and silver means wealth. The foolish are held to be wise and the wicked good if only they are possessed of gold and silver. On the contrary one who has neither gold nor silver is held to be poor. However wise he may be he is dubbed a fool. A clever man with no money is regarded by the public as a dullard. And a good man so circumstanced is looked upon as a worthless person. As all things, life or death, success or failure, depend upon the possession of gold, all people irrespective of rank run after gold as the first requisite of existence.

Japan was a country of about 2 6 million workers, a few hundred thousand samurai, and a handful of daimios. The daimio, to be sure, performed a function. He was the agrarian entrepreneur. He managed the economic producing unit—the estate or barony or plantation. The wretched farmers under the daimios were levied upon “so that they should neither die nor live.”1 All above what was necessary to the most meager subsistence of the workers was taken by the daimio as his share. He used that to get the things he wished by barter and translated as much as possible into money. The Lord of Kaga had an income of over a million koku, which seems large. But he operated a barony with a population of 586,000 souls and he had to maintain not merely the economic machinery of this vast estate but supply all the functions of a highly independent local government as well. There were about forty-five daimios with incomes of 100,000 koku or over and 195 with incomes of 10,000 koku or more. There were many whose incomes were so small as to be unimportant.

But the samurai rendered literally no service whatever. He was a professional warrior with no battles to fight during the long Shogunate peace.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.