Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/158

 ally have been expected. Scarcely ninety years had elapsed before the Government found it necessary to prohibit the hoarding of cash, and to remind the agricultural class that, in the event of a bad harvest, coins could not be cooked and eaten. But the propensity to hoard had already become epidemic. Another decree quickly followed, declaring that any person who concealed coins and paid his taxes in kind, would have his store of cash confiscated, one-fifth of the amount being promised to an informer. All through the history of these early centuries the arbitrariness and the embarrassments of Japan's empirical financiers may be traced. The people, of frugal habits and generally in humble circumstances, had little use for exchange media of large denominations. They did not want gold or silver coins, except to a very limited extent, and could not have procured them, for the mintage of such tokens was insignificant. When a merchant came into possession of either gold or silver, he paid it out by weight, cutting it into parallelograms of the required size; and in later times—from the eleventh to the sixteenth century—all coinage operations being interrupted by domestic troubles, the precious metals were exported to China to purchase copper tokens, for which alone any really wide use existed. While the mint worked, it turned out from five and one-half to one and three-fourths millions of copper cash annually,—figures whose difference indicates not