Kamakura Period [1185 - 1333] Japan was a time when the economy was booming,
cash was flowing like piss down your pants when you saw your investments this year.
And what’s the best way to spend new money?
Gambling and falling into debt.
People wrote a lot of gambling stories back in those days.
In one popular story, there was a group of
samurai who spent everyday playing a gambling game.
It was super fun.
Wow who’s losing their life’s savings today?
But one older samurai had no money, so he couldn’t hang with the boys.
One night he told his wife about his predicament.
Said he didn’t really like gambling, he knew it was a bad habit.
He just didn’t want to be left out.
His wife felt bad so she went out one day
and sold her robe for 500 coins and gave it
to her husband.
It wasn’t much, but it meant he could play.
He prayed to the Buddhist gods while
rolling the dice and oh my Buddha,
somehow turned 500 coins into 30,000.
The samurai was so happy that he went home and left his poor wife.
He gave her part of the winnings, of course,
then left to become a monk,
devoting himself to Buddhism so he could enter
the blissful Pure Land in the afterlife.
His wife was actually happy for him.
It was a story about the benefits of Buddhist worship,
and of a dysfunctional marriage.
Point is, there were many stories of gambling, showing that it was rampant.
Coin money was becoming popular, and coins were kickass for gambling
because they were easy to carry around and count.
Counting is super important, just ask any chaperone for a school field trip.
When gambling you had to divide and multiply bets accurately.
It’s simple to divide 10 coins in half, harder to divide a chicken.
The ruling shogunate kept issuing orders telling
its samurai to please for the love of Buddha
stop with the gambling and the borrowing of the money.
Merchants and moneylenders made it rich in the expanding economy,
but the samurai fell on hard times.
Everyone gambled, but why did it hurt the samurai extra hard?
A samurai’s income traditionally came from their lands.
Villagers paid rent and taxes.
That was how things worked for a long time,
money and goods flowed from the commoners to the elites,
bottom to the top.
A samurai’s income was pretty much fixed, but as the economy grew and
people started making mad money in marketplaces,
samurai income fell behind that of merchants and moneylenders.
The samurai were aching for money the way I ache for boba tea.
Some needed cash to pay their lords, some needed gambling money,
and some just wanted the latest BMW horse,
to keep up a certain lifestyle.
Yes, money can’t buy happiness.
But they didn’t want to buy happiness, they wanted to buy stuff.
So what happens when you don’t have cash?
Just follow the philosophy of the people I meet on Tinder,
use someone else’s cash.
Many samurai borrowed cash from moneylenders,
using their own lands, and then lost their lands
because they couldn’t pay back the loans.
There are old letters where samurai were desperately
pushing their men to raise money so they wouldn’t lose their properties.
The shogunate leaders saw what was happening
to its samurai and tried to stop it.
Look at that, a government caring about its people,
probably exists but did not exist here.
The shogunate had a good system going.
It gave lands to its samurai, and the samurai
served the shogunate because they wanted land.
A samurai’s loyalty was as strong as his land holdings.
No more land, no more reason to serve.
This could dick up the whole system.
So the shogunate leaders passed laws to try and fix the problem.
They said you couldn’t sell land that the shogunate gave you without approval.
They said if a samurai of the shogunate paid back
more than half his debt, his lands could not be taken.
Instead, the loan would be adjusted to give him the opportunity to pay it back.
Sometimes instead of giving his land away, a samurai made the lender his deputy,
which gave the lender some power and a cut of the income from the land.
So the shogunate banned appointing moneylenders as deputies.
The biggest hammer that the shogunate used to smash moneylenders
was a 1297 law that said all the debts of its samurai
would be forgiven, and they could even take back
the lands they lost.
The shogunate also refused to hear lawsuits from lenders.
All of these laws were like your past boyfriends, they didn’t work.
The big hammer law was a big disaster.
People were confused about who it applied to.
Only samurai who reported directly to the shogunate qualified,
but there were samurai who didn’t.
Many of these samurai took advantage of the confusion to steal land back.
Even though the shogunate said it wouldn’t hear lawsuits from lenders,
the lawsuits piled up from lenders who claimed the law did not apply to them.
It was a tanuki ballslap to the face of the economy, and the economy stumbled
because lenders lost so much money.
But even the samurai got hurt, because lenders stopped lending to them.
Too much risk.
The law was such a disaster that the next year, the shogunate said,
“Oops, our bad,” and repealed it.
These laws failed because the issue was deeper:
samurai relied on traditional income from their lands.
That wasn’t enough in a growing market economy.
Lending houses grew into massive mammoths of money during this time.
Godzillas of Gold.
People said they contained all the wealth in the world.
This new economic engine choo-choo’d its way through the medieval period.
People who relied on the traditional income system
fell behind as time went on,
even the elites in the shogunate and the capital.
You could no longer just count on the taxes and rents from the people
working on your land.
The ones who succeeded were people who adapted with the times.
Elites got wiser and started tapping into the market, did things like taxing goods,
charging fees for commercial guilds, and even getting into moneylending themselves.
The market couldn’t be stopped.
Marketplaces changed everything in Japan, check out this video to learn how.
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