Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/165

 the Taikō. It remained in operation—not, however, without occasional debasement of the coins—until the abolition of feudalism in 1871, when one of the Government's first measures was to establish a mint in Ōsaka, equip it with foreign machinery, and strike coins after the Occidental pattern. The financiers of the new era chose the gold standard, taking for unit a quantity of pure gold represented in the Japanese metrical system by an integral weight (four fun), having for its Occidental equivalent one and one-half grammes. Ten per cent of copper being added, a coin was obtained approximately equal in value to the gold dollar of America. This was the yen (literally, a "round" thing). Silver occupied a subsidiary rank, and was linked to the standard gold coin by the ratio of 16.17 to 1. It as already been described how this system subsequently drifted into silver monometallism, and how the gold standard was afterwards resumed by a bold and well-conceived arrangement.

This retrospect of Japan's media of exchange having been carried independently to a conclusion, in order to avoid the necessity of incidental reference to it in other contexts, the story of the course of trade may now be resumed.

Among the salable chattels in the early times servants were included. In the legislation of the eighth century there stood an enactment that if within three days after purchasing a servant, a horse, or an ox, the buyer discovered his acquisi-