Nagano Castle is a hirayamajiro (a castle built on a hill), not nearly as beautiful as the famous Japanese castles from the Warring States that everyone knows from later times. Its foundations are stone and wood, its earthen walls are whitewashed but mottled with age, looking rather shabby. There isn't any of those picturesque tenshu towers you see in scenic photos of Japan nowadays either. Overall, it's quite unremarkable, giving no hint at all of the important stronghold it would become in later times in Japan's central plains.
Fortunately, Owari Province is a vital transportation hub in medieval Japan, serving as the key overland artery connecting Kyoto, Kaido Town, Shimazu, Atsuta, and Jumogawa—a bustling corridor of trade and culture, and the best, shortest, and safest land route in the region.
So, even though Owari Province itself doesn't have any famous specialties, with only the pottery and local weaving industries being somewhat well-developed, Nagano Castle is still quite prosperous. The area covered by its town is large and there are many shops and travelers.
The roads are paved with gravel, and people in street-facing shops regularly sprinkle water with wooden ladles to keep the dust down. The business environment is not bad at all.
The buildings themselves are much the same as farmhouses—post-and-beam structures on level ground, divided into an earth floor and a raised area. The raised earth floor is more refined than in farmhouses, usually laid with wooden planks, and a few even have tasteful woven tatami mats with patterns.
The earthen-floored area faces the street, serving as the business section. The shopfront shutters facing the street are usually dropped down to form a counter, products are displayed to attract customers, or placards with names and prices are set out. Interested customers will step inside to look the merchandise over. Managers or shop assistants warmly attend to them, and important clients are invited into the raised area for tea.
The town is even more bustling than Harano had expected.
He strolled along, glancing at the "yagō" (shop names) and banners (advertisements) lining the road. He spotted Whale Houses (brothels doubling as bars, sometimes even small casinos), bathhouses with banners reading "Kyoto Stone Steam" or "Steam Therapy", and saw plenty of more typical shops—rice shops, blacksmiths, cloth stores, restaurants. Street performers abounded too: monkey trainers, storytellers, cockfighting gamblers, dancers, puppet troupes—a lively spectacle.
He even noticed a public toilet somewhere—a good five hundred years ahead of India, at the very least.
Wandering through the town, for a moment Harano could have thought he'd stepped into the Song Dynasty—if only most of the passersby weren't three-foot-tall, Wu Dalang types, it nearly felt like a re-creation of the bustling markets described in books about Song-era towns.
But then again, ever since the Sui and Tang dynasties, Japan had been eagerly absorbing the essence of Huaxia culture, so this scene was hardly surprising.
Once he'd satisfied his nostalgic curiosity by exploring the town, Harano collected himself and got back to business. He was here to sell a few things, just to solve the immediate problem of getting enough to eat for the time being, so Yayoi's family wouldn't go bankrupt right away. Still, he wasn't in a rush, and quickly turned his attention to the prices—if you're going to sell stuff, you need to haggle. You can't just open your mouth and start spouting nonsense.
Copper coins were used here, and more than eighty percent were Huaxia coins.
The best were Ming Dynasty Yongle Coins, followed by well-preserved Song Coins, Tang Coins, and other Ming Coins. After that came Quanzhou Coins (a catch-all for imported privately-cast coins), and then the truly shabby local Japanese copper coins of unclear origin, with the worst being coins made of unidentified tin or iron.
The first two types generally counted as "good money," while the rest were "evil money." As for the exchange rates…
According to Harano's observations and some digging, one thousand wen of "good money" made a full string (also called a 'full strand', seldom used for private transactions). Eight hundred forty wen would make up a market-standard string (not a fixed amount, as it fluctuates with market conditions, but benchmarked to the price of silver). One hundred wen equaled one hiki, which could be exchanged for three to four times as much "evil money."
If it was the worst of the "evil money," such as the tin or iron coins you could snap in half with a little effort, you could conservatively get a six-, seven-, or even eightfold exchange.
No one was seen using silver or gold—those must be high-denomination currencies not used for daily trade, but they could be exchanged. At the end of one street, he found a "Ginza" where patrons could convert gold or silver lumps, or gold dust, into assorted copper coins—but not the other way around. Who knows if you'd call that an ancient bank.
As for the exchange rate: one tael of gold could be traded for forty to fifty taels of silver depending on quality; one tael of silver could fetch about eight hundred and forty Yongle coins, roughly one market-standard string. Of course, the quality mattered—a tael of poor silver certainly wouldn't get you eight hundred forty wen.
Now, about prices…
Using Yongle coins as the benchmark, a koku (ishi) of brown rice cost eight hundred six wen at the rice shop. A koku of polished rice was one string and two hundred twenty wen. The price of a koku of beans varied by type: black beans were four hundred fifty wen, yellow beans four hundred ninety, green beans five hundred fifty, and red beans went for seven hundred.
Buckwheat was even cheaper; its price per koku was about the same as black or yellow beans, mostly within four hundred to five hundred wen depending on quality. Older, inferior wheat mixed with bran or sand was cheaper still—you could get a koku for just over three hundred wen.
As for what a koku (ishi) was: the ishi here refers to a unit of volume, originally a measure based on a grain-storage container.
Weighing with any precision was difficult in ancient times, especially in the countryside; so the people of Huaxia got used to measuring by volume instead. You'd carve out a container of a particular size—fill it up, and that was one koku. Expressions like "rank of two thousand koku" from the Han era came from this practice.
Why is the word now pronounced as "dan"? That's because of Zhu Yuanzhang.
Being from Fengyang, where the local dialect pronounces "shi" as "dan," Zhu insisted on that pronunciation. Presumably no one in his court dared correct him with "Your Majesty, what nonsense are you spouting? As emperor you should speak proper language—are you still just a farm boy?" for fear of being skinned alive, so from the Hongwu era on, that's how it's been pronounced.
But back to the topic. Japan also copied the kanji "shi" as a unit for capacity in ancient times, but the exact volume changed, and changed repeatedly. By the late Muromachi Shogunate, Harano roughly guessed a koku was just over 120 kilos in modern terms—a sizable amount, hard for a single person to carry.
Of course, that's not completely precise. 1 koku = 10 to (buckets), 1 to = 10 sho, 1 sho = 10 go. His estimate of the weight for a to and sho was just that—a rough guess by feel.
Still, it should be close enough. He remembered seeing information at the Nagoya City Museum—during the Japan Warring States Period, an Ashigaru's daily ration was generally 5 go of brown rice. 1 go equals a little over 120 grams; 5 go is a bit over 600 grams—about one and a quarter jin of staple food, enough to keep up one's energy. When cooked, rice would expand and get heavier—especially since at the time the usual Japanese method was to cook rice almost dry, making the volume even greater. Plus, Ashigaru got soy sauce, pickles, dried radish, dried taro, miso, and the like along with their rice, and on campaign they'd supplement their diet with stolen chickens or ducks and such—so you could just about get enough to eat.
Also, 5 go was the peacetime training ration. In wartime, the daily rice ration was 10 go, sometimes with sake or assorted side dishes as well.
So, by this calculation, he would only need just over two koku of rice to feed himself for a year—enough to guarantee basic survival. Add in one sick person, call it four koku, so as long as he got a little over three strings of Yongle coins, he'd have no worries for now?
If he wanted to live with some quality, double that at most. Six or seven strings would easily cover a year's food?
This was all somewhat simpler than he'd expected…
Playing "Taiko 2" before, Harano had always thought you'd need to shell out at least a thousand strings to count as actually having money.
He breathed a little easier, slipped out of the rice shop under the curious gaze of the clerk, and browsed along the street stalls as he went. Some were peddlers hawking needles, thread, and scraps of cloth, while others were local villagers, hunters, or fishermen selling mountain goods and products from the river.
Crucian carp and loaches went two for one wen, a forearm-sized carp cost about ten wen, a battered wolf pelt was a hundred fifty, a large, unidentifiable bird was fifteen wen (all the big feathers had been plucked and sold separately), a small basket of dried mushrooms was twenty-five, with a big slab of dried bamboo shoot thrown in for good measure.
Hmm, dried bamboo shoots at this time of year must be surplus from last year?
The peddlers' bits and bobs were about what you'd expect too.
All sorts of needles and thread were around ten wen, bamboo "fire folds" for lighting fires were five (a bamboo tube pierced with a small hole, holding paper scraps, raw cotton, and sulfur inside—light it, cap the end, and it'll smolder for a day or two, just blow to rekindle), brass ear spoons were five, and there were all sorts of odd little items.
For instance, roof-shaped hemp kerchiefs, wide-brimmed bamboo hats with veils, straw boots looking like real boots, four-tie grass sandals, six-tie grass shoes, blessing grass shoes, sock-like messily braided grass sandals without ties or backs, thick-soled, high-bottomed straw "shota", slip-on short grass shoes with no heel braid, straw-rope geta—most priced between five and twenty wen.
Alongside these quirky daily necessities were a few little trinkets: silver-plated copper bangles, silver-plated copper magatama beads, cut-glass beads, copper and wood hairpins and combs—generally from a dozen to a hundred or so wen, and one seller even had a complete set of wooden combs in a lacquered box, each carved with all the Seven Lucky Gods, serving for both decorative and daily grooming needs—the whole set cost three hundred fifty wen.
What caught Harano's eye further was a complete set of tooth-blackening tools—copper bowls, a copper-juice boiler, a copper box for gall-ink, and a mouthwashing copper ewer, all in matching patterns, light and elegant, almost antique. This whole set was going for five strings, though the seller, looking like an old farmer, made Harano suspect these might be stolen goods or funeral objects.
The horse market wasn't inside the town proper. Supposedly, the City Lord had ordered it moved out for some reason, but when Harano casually asked about it, a stall owner told him an ordinary pack horse—if its teeth checked out—cost around two strings, about equivalent to a regular Lang Faction member's entire annual income. If he were an orphan with no wife or children, and sold off all the rations provided by the Patriarch, he could buy a pack horse with a year's work.
Pack horses were pretty cheap; as for warhorses and famous breeds, the price could range from ten-odd strings to dozens or even hundreds—out of reach for most folks.
With all this, Harano felt he had a clear grasp of current prices. Having fixed his own bottom line, he went in search of an "Earth Store" and slipped inside.