Well, JR, you got me. There are those little exceptions in Hideyoshi's time. But now that you're going back to the late 16th and early 17th centuries, you'll wake up KK and he'll start ranting about zen buddhists ruining everything.
... I'll get to that book. Just finished an economic history of fishing villages in Chikuzen during the Tokugawa period. (Marine fisheries...) Next up is Toshie, biography of an ordinary woman born in Niigata in 1925 (but not the koi-raising part of Niigata).
BTW, you might enjoy the passage below, ala Bear Stearns... The fishing industry had complex relationships with the merchant class. In the early 19th century several merchant houses suffered financially. One merchant, Kaneuchiya, was at risk of losing everything... sake brewery, rice lands, pawnshops, fishing net partnerships, etc. But the feudal authorities came to the rescue, granting credits that remained as indebtedness for the better part of a century. The author states: "There is no simple answer to why the authorities for seventy years gave financial assistance to keep this house afloat. Economic convenience was probably one reason. Kaneuchiya had built up a wide network of business partners. A bankruptcy would have disturbed this network profoundly and harmed trade. If Kaneuchiya pressed its many debtors, they might have been forced into bankruptcy as well. In short, the Fukuoka authorities might have been quite pragmatic about the situation and decided to save a financial house for the same reasons trading houses are saved by the Japanese government today."
Deja vu.
4 Weeks Ago
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