Comments on: A Welcome Find

By: Michael Schiltz

Michael Schiltz — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:56:32 +0000

Hi John and Jonathan, thanks for paying attention to my webproject. Concerning the differentiation of standards, I mainly wanted to draw attention to the importance and realities of social stratification. It is indeed amazing that the denominations of gold, or silver, or copper were relatively independent from the other two metals. Or: it is not so amazing if one considers that the social and regional differentiation of feudal socieites make it hard to speak of a ‘standard’ after all. Obviously, the samurai class did not only use gold, nor did the merchants only use silver, but the use of metals was remarkably consistent with (a) certain social class(es). That is simply to say that premodern or, in this case: feudal, economies, are less integrated than we are used to in modern times. Certain social practices (e.g. the practice of the gift in the samurai class) make it necessary to speak of different types of economies. For instance: gift economies do not function as market economies, as a wealth of sociological data make clear.

By: K. M. Lawson

K. M. Lawson — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 18:40:02 +0000

I think I know who you are talking about. Don’t know much about him except that I ignore anything his name is on in Japanese bookstores. He has a whole section dedicated to him at the Yasukuni shrine museum Yûshûkan as well, Japanese right-wingers are a big fan, if it is the guy who I am thinking of.

By: ACB

ACB — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 12:08:57 +0000

What do you know about a nasty little Taiwanese author names Ko Bunyu whose is resident in Japan and who been printing some unplesent anti-China books?

By: John Sanders

John Sanders — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 11:31:52 +0000

I am not in opposition to thinking that most transactions involving Gold were conducted by a samural class. Nor that most activities involving silver were conducted by tradesmen, and copper by everyone. I do not think I would go along with the idea that people have a tendency to only want to transact business in one metal only. As an example, although not quite the same, but it will give some idea to my thinking. In the USA, not everyone uses $100 or $500 dollar bills. That is because their use is for practical purposes conducted for large transactions. Most people use $1, $5, $10 bill. That does not mean that only drug dealers use $100 bills and the common people use $1 bills. Copper coins would generally be used by most people because most items they procured were more conveniently bought using copper coins. Tradesmen would obviously take in large amounts of copper coins. They probably would use silver to pay their taxes and purchase largee quantities of mercandise just because it was more convenient to do so.

History conspiring comments were in the earlier sections, I think before he went into his comments on semantics. I skipped that section, although it may be useful to read. But, given this is an economic history, I would have preferred his basis of economic theory (I myself am in the Austrian Economic School, but if you are a Marxist or a keynesian or perhaps follow Friedman, it is nice to know. To me, the semantics theory only reflects on the public relations part of the history.

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 08:33:38 +0000

I can't seem to find the conspiracy comment, but I did find the tri-metallic coinage discussion. I agree that there's something overly schematic about it (particularly given plenty of contemporary sources that describe samurai using silver and copper coinage, merchants using gold, etc), but I don't think it's entirely whacky, either. In a multi-metallic coinage system with floating exchange rates, most people would probably try to keep their transactions uni-metallic, which would help explain the existence of multiple denominations in each metal (though one thing about the denomination comments confuses me: I thought there was only one standard size copper coin). Moreover, there is a strong association with gold/stipend/gift/samurai, silver/weight/merchants and copper was for everyone.... I'm going to have to root around in there a bit more carefully, though, I can tell.