In an old Japanese story, there was a rich merchant.
He traveled far and wide for business and everywhere he went,
behind him were more than 100 horses,
with rice and silk on their backs and fatigue for life in their eyes.
Why did the merchant drag 100 horses around with him?
Because back then, people used rice and silk to pay for stuff,
they used it for money.
If you bought something big, you needed a whole parade to pay for it.
This was kind of a pain in ass.
Not only did you have to carry your money around,
you needed to pay for the horses that carried your money,
and horses charged an arm and a leg.
We all know it’s a bad idea to walk around
flashing fat stacks of Benjamins to everyone,
or in your case, Washingtons,
so you can see why it was dangerous
to have a parade of horses flashing your money
to the plebs everywhere you go.
And sure enough, in the story,
the merchant ran into a band of thieves.
The rest of the story has nothing to do with the video topic,
so I’ll tell you the rest at the end.
The point is, in a growing economy, rice and silk money?
Kinda s--t. What you really want is coin money.
And that’s where markets came in.
Markets were awesome, and they
even led to the rise of one RPG profession.
Can you guess which one, in the comments?
Markets are awesome, but sometimes they get destroyed,
like markets in Ukraine right now okay?
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In the Kamakura Period [1185 - 1333], which was early medieval times,
markets started popping up across the face of
Japan like zits across your face in high school.
People started using coins at these markets
because they were convenient to carry around.
And coins made buying stuff easier, which encouraged more markets.
A 69 of economic progress.
Markets are pretty cool.
Anyone who’s been to a farmer’s market
will tell you that nothing’s better than finding fresh local produce
for bragging on Instagram about how you support local farmers.
Early markets in the Nara Period [710 - 794]
were in the capital, areas that people gathered
to buy and sell stuff.
These markets were losers compared to what they would become.
Skip to the Heian Period [794 - 1185], and the capital had whole business districts,
with street names like Oil Lane where people sold all kinds of oils,
and Brocade Street where people didn’t know what that meant.
You could buy a million different things like
food, cloth, and even luxury Chinese goods from
Chinese traders who traveled a long way to sell mundane Chinese items as luxury goods.
Most shoppers were elites because they had money.
The economy back then
centered around the nobles and temples at the top.
The elites were swallowers.
Even without markets, they swallowed a steady stream of goods
from the provinces through the tax system,
because people could pay taxes or rent in goods.
Sorry, I can’t make rent this month, here’s 50 hats.
But this started changing.
Smaller markets popped up in the provinces,
a sign that the economy was soaring.
The Heian Nasudaku was at an all time high,
mainly thanks to clever inventors inventing new farming tools and techniques.
This created a new economy separate from the give-everything-to-the-rich economy.
People outside of the capital had places to buy the things they needed
and sellers had access to a whole bunch of customers.
By the Kamakura Period [1185 - 1333],
marketplaces in cities like the capital were huge.
But rural markets in the provinces
were also super active. Old writings said the
market was a busy, lively ass place with sellers yelling about s--t they wanna sell
and buyers yelling about how that s--t was highway robbery.
Commerce the way it’s supposed to be.
The best surviving piece of art of a medieval market
was a drawing from the year 1299.
Like my bank account, it has seen better days okay, squint your eyes or something.
The market is near a river. You see boats unloading products.
Water and roads were popular market spots,
especially rivers and coasts because
you could move things faster over water than land.
Vendors sell their products in 5 stalls,
we see sandals, cloth, rice, fish, and pottery.
There are children running and people talking, you can kinda hear the scene.
It sounds like those generic audios of a crowd that YouTubers put in their videos.
The first markets in the provinces only met once or twice a month.
By the mid 1300s, that wasn’t enough
and it was common for markets to open 3 times a month.
They had a schedule, usually days that ended in a certain number,
like okay we’ll open up this bish on the 4th, the 14th, and the 24th, but that’s it.
By the mid 1400s, that wasn’t enough
and 6-a-month markets became common.
A few markets even opened everyday. I know!
People set up markets in places that were convenient and had high foot traffic,
so places near rivers and roads, or outside
a big landowner’s house or the gates of a temple.
Being next to a temple or shrine was nice
because they had influence and could help protect the market from government taxes.
When not in session, the market space could be used by anyone,
like beggars to sleep in, or traveling monks to do nothing in.
Running a market gave you mad respect in the region and mad money in your pocket,
so powerful people like major landowners and
samurai competed for good market locations.
Sometimes, a samurai would make a deal with a landlord
to use the same market space but at different times.
“Okay I’ll host my market on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays,
and you can host yours on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
and we can count our money and bishes on the weekends.”
Marketplaces spread easily across Japan like butter across my butt,
and it made everything better.
It improved the lives of commoners.
There’s an outdated agriculture-centric view of Japan before the modern age,
which sees the Japanese as mostly farmers living in self-sufficient communities,
making most of the things they needed to survive
and only trading for things they couldn’t make.
But markets destroy that theory.
As Einstein once said, why *make* s--t yourself when you
could go to the market and buy s--t,
from someone who probably makes better s--t.
Commoners didn’t live in self-sufficient communities,
they lived in communities that were connected
and dependent on each other.
Markets allowed people to focus on one or two things,
instead of having to make everything they needed.
So if there was a village famous for making kickass pottery,
you’d go to the market and buy pots from that village.
Knowing Japan, the people of Potsville probably had pot-making techniques
that were passed down for generations,
servants massaging pots to keep them at the right amount of happiness.
Thanks to markets, Potsville could focus on making the best pots
without wasting their time making mid-tier hammers for themselves,
they would just go to the good folks of Hammerstead at the market
and buy kickass hammers.
Instead of being self-sufficient and owning okay stuff,
people traded to own the best stuff.
Markets had all the best stuff.
Commoners started calling themselves Aladdin
because they realized a whole new world opened up to them,
a whole new world of making money.
They made things to sell to the ravenous consumers of the cities.
Interestingly, cities were actually similar to beauty influencers,
they used a lot of products.
But the market wasn’t just for business.
With so many people coming and going,
it was a good place to meet people and talk and get
important news from other parts of the country.
How are things in the capital?
Which daughter did the Fujiwara marry into the imperial family today?
It was another way markets connected communities.
Gossip is a great tool for forming bonds.
When your ex is talking s--t about your new relationship,
she’s fostering connections, being a good member of the community.
All this economic activity gave rise
to a new RPG profession in Japan: The Merchant.
Did you guess right?
If not, you should be ashamed, and admit it in the comments.
There were merchants before, of course,
but they received a massive buff in early medieval times.
When markets started popping up in the provinces, there were people who made
a living going back and forth between the regional markets of the provinces and the
business districts of the capital, buying from one place and selling to another.
The merchants linked the rural economies of the provinces
to the city economy of the capital.
People in the capital and the handful of other cities in Japan,
were similar to city people today,
they couldn’t grow s--t, but they still needed food.
So merchants made a killing shipping in
food from the countryside.
Produce and goods flowed into cities,
and cash flowed back to rural villages.
It was a relationship that made both sides happy, but sometimes it got rocky.
Sometimes merchants took advantage of famines and droughts
and jacked up their prices.
Money doesn’t buy happiness, because you don’t have enough money yet.
During one famine, a government official complained about merchants.
“Ayo about these dirty price gouging merchant mfers,” he began.
“They have the audacity to buy stuff from one place
and sell it at another place for 3 times the cost.
Some even lend a bit of their money now,
to make a profit off the interest later.” Terrible.
He then says that poor people were selling
their wives and children to pay these merchants.
With all this traveling about, merchants ran into a common Asian problem.
There was too much rice.
Carrying all that rice money behind you
was like swinging your dick around everywhere you went.
Size shouldn’t matter, but 20 meters is ridiculous.
It just enticed people to try and take some of that dick home.
And so merchants stopped using rice, they used coins,
Chinese copper coins that came from China.
20 meters of rice replaced by 9 inches of coin.
A more reasonable size, one that I’m more familiar with.
Merchants helped spread the use of coins.
Coins made everything easier.
Easy to carry, easy to count,
easy to buy and sell at specific amounts.
Coins became common,
there are documents of moneylenders lending
hundreds of thousands of coins at a time for large purchases.
So what happened to that merchant
who ran into a band of thieves?
They started taking everything.
Instead of panicking, the merchant looked into the distance
and yelled “You’re late! You’re late!”
“He done lost his marbles,” the thieves said.
But then a swarm of 4 inch long wasps
arrived and killed all the thieves.
You see, the merchant brewed wine at home for wasps to drink,
and in return they became his protectors.
Moral of the story: Even wasps know how to repay kindness.
You should also repay kindness to the people in your life.
Like I said, nothing to do with the video topic.
Also, a merchant traveling with 100 horses
worth of rice and silk was probably an exaggeration,
or at least a super rare case.
Chinese coins became the main currency of the market.
How did Japan get so many Chinese coins,
enough to support their economy?
That’s a hella interesting story, click here to check it out.
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