nowadays we all take for granted that
you can pay for stuff with bills and
coins but you know someone had to start
the whole system up right and there's no
guarantee that things would work out in
the Nara period Japan started making
coins for money it was a great plan it
was gonna be stable it was gonna make
the government strong it was it it
failed
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seconds thanks the next time you're at a
cash-only Asian restaurants frantically
digging into your wallet while muttering
something about dirty tax dodgers
remember that paper and coin money was
an outstanding tremendous idea back in
the day even though it's a pain in the
ass now also remember that this is how
we Asians take over America you white
people may as well give up now you had a
good run let us take over and we'll do
math and stuff around the NADA time
period people were mainly using rice in
fabrics as currency they use other
things too but rice and fabric were the
most popular those had problems though
rice took up a lot of space it could
mold rodents liked to eat it and you can
store it for long so you had to spend
your rice quickly saving piles of rice
for retirement wasn't an option
now fabric was pretty good actually but
it could rip and get stained and get
eaten by bugs but the main reasons the
Japanese Imperial courts decided to mint
coins was not because of those issues
the nobles and courts wanted to conserve
valuable goods instead of having people
use them for currency and also they
wanted money money money now if you
think it's easy to get people to adopt a
coinage system think again in 708 the
courts released silver and copper coins
to the public and immediately hit a wall
of problems the silver coins were a bust
in the early 700 s silver was rare the
value of the silver in the coins was
likely worth more than the face value of
the coins but the face value was already
too high for normal everyday usage not
only that people immediately made
counterfeit coins by mixing in cheaper
metals and the thick coins began driving
the good coins out of circulation
the government soon admitted defeat and
stopped the whole silver coin business
copper coins had a much longer run this
was when the court was moving the
capital from Fujiwara
to nara copper coins funded the massive
project the government put them into
circulation by paying the construction
workers with copper coins they also
started paying in coin to government
officials and workers on other projects
now when you launch a new currency you
wanted to circulate people hoarding
coins kept them out of circulation it
turned out hoarders were a big problem
because we found a government's order
condemning people who hoarded coins
demanding that they returned the coins
to the governments to help with this
problem the courts allowed people to
exchange coins for courts ranks
basically buying government positions so
things haven't really changed inflation
became a huge headache at first it
seemed like the copper coins were a
major success they were worth much more
than they took to make netting huge
profits for the Japanese courts people
at the top were rolling in cash it
didn't last nature took his course and
people started making counterfeit coins
think about how hard it was to catch a
counterfeiter back in those days there
were no serial numbers if you could
replicate a coin we could introduce it
into the economy and it would have been
impossible to trace it back to you it
would have been hard to even
differentiate a real coin from a fake
one a government document in 760 claimed
that half half of all copper coins were
fake the fake coins led to inflation the
government saw this and thought hey
let's make it worse and made even more
coins faster it was too profitable not
to and then if that wasn't bad enough
something happened out of nowhere that
no one anticipated Trump won the
election now between 735 and 737 a
smallpox epidemic hit Japan killing 1/4
to 1/3 of the population such a deadly
plague is there's more discussion but
since we're just talking economics at
the moment we'll just ignore all the
death destruction and suffering the
sudden drop in workers caused havoc in
the supply chain and
resulted in temporary shortages of food
and goods driving up prices and
inflation that was only temporary though
in the wake of the smallpox epidemic
after the initial shortages things were
pretty good economically a bunch of
people were still dead which was a good
thing
economically you see being dead meant
you didn't need to buy things and there
were a lot of dead people who didn't buy
things it drove down the demand for
goods allowing the high inflation to
subside but then the courts ran into
another problem having so many taxpayers
die really hurts tax revenue they tried
to counter this in a few ways they
started offering government's loans
which helped but wasn't enough been in
760 they minted another copper coin at a
higher value unfortunately in an attempt
to reap the prolific profits of the past
they made this coin ten times the value
of the previous one inflation again
skyrocketed and didn't stop over the
next two centuries they kept minting
different coins at higher and higher
values the coins kept getting smaller
and contained lesser amounts of copper
it was a mess in the 900s the courts
finally said we give up and stops the
coinage effort the government's began
paying in commodities again like rice
there were other factors that led to
this of course but the mess I had with
coins was the big factor and so the
great Nara money experiments failed
Japan didn't use coins again until much
later
now just because they had to stop making
coins doesn't mean the whole endeavor
was a waste in fact it was extremely
profitable for the aristocracy in the
Nara period it swelled at the Imperial
courses wealth and funded many
government projects including the Nara
capital itself so if you look at it from
the perspective of the people at the top
the whole thing turned out pretty well
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