CURRENCY, WEIGHTS AND MEASURES AND OFFICIAL TERMS

The prices given in the text (but not in the footnotes and Appendix) were recorded before the War inflation began.  The War was followed by a severe financial crisis.  Professor Nasu wrote to me during the summer of 1921: 

“You are very wise to leave the figures as they stood.  It is useless to try to correct them, because they are still changing.  The price of rice, which did not exceed 15 yen per koku when you were making your research work, exceeded 50 yen in 1919, and is now struggling to maintain the price of 25 yen.  Taking at 100 the figures for the years 1915 or 1916—­fortunately there is not much difference between these two years—­the prices of six leading commodities reached in 1919 an average of about 250.  After 1919 the prices of some commodities went still higher, but mostly they did not change very much; on the other hand, recently the prices of many commodities—­among them rice and raw silk especially—­have been coming down and this downward movement is gradually extending to all other commodities.  From these considerations I deduce that the index number of general commodities may be safely taken as 200 when your book appears. The reader of your book has simply to double the figures given by you—­that is the figures of 1915 and 1916—­in order to get a rough estimate of present prices.”

Where exact statements of area and yield are necessary, as in the study of the intense agriculture of Japan, local measures are preferable to our equivalents in awkward fractions.  Further, the measures used in this book are easily remembered, and no serious study of Japanese agriculture on the spot is possible without remembering them.  While, however, Japanese currency, weights and measures have been uniformly used, equivalents have been supplied at every place in the book where their omission might be reasonably considered to interfere with easy reading.  The following tables are restricted to currency, weights and measures mentioned in the book.

MONEY[9]

Yen = roughly (at the time notes for the book were made) a florin or half a dollar = 100 sen.

Sen = a farthing or half cent = 10 rin.

LONG

Ri = roughly 2-1/2 miles.

Shaku (roughly 1 ft.) = 11.93 in.

Ri are converted into miles by being multiplied by 2.44.

SQUARE

Ri (roughly 6 sq. miles) = 5.955 sq. miles.

Cho (sometimes written, Chobu) (roughly 2-1/2 acres) = 2.450 acres = 10 tan = 3,000 tsubo.

Tan or Tambu (roughly 1/4 acre) = 0.245 acres = 10 se = 300 bu.

Bu or Tsubo (roughly 4 sq. yds.) = 3.953 sq. yds.