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Coins and commerce in
classical Japan
Mikami Yoshitaka, with Joshua Batts
Beginning in the latter half of the seventh century with the adoption of the ritsuryō system, the
classical Japanese state carried out an overhaul of its structures of governance through the impor-
tation of a variety of systems and cultural products from the Tang dynasty (618–907) in China.
One such import was a system of currency. The early Japanese state imitated the shape and form
of the copper coins issued by the court in China, thereby putting into circulation an original cur-
rency in the Japanese archipelago as well.
Publications on coins in Japan prior to 1600 in English remain extremely limited, and work
devoted to their circulation and production in the Nara and Heian periods is practically nonexist-
ent. Western scholarship focusing specifically on currency typically begins coverage with the
importation of Sung coins into the archipelago in the twelfth century. There are, in fact, but two
book- length monographs on the development of a money economy in Japan prior to the Toku-
gawa period (1600–1868).
The most recent, Ethan Segal’s Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval
Japan, discusses the development of a cash economy and expanding markets from roughly 1150
to 1400, emphasizing the economic growth of the era and the important role of peripheral actors
in the increased use of cash and financial instruments such as bills of exchange. Segal argues that
the advent of money and markets destabilized the political order of landed elites until they took
a more involved role after 1400. Segal’s timeframe is the early medieval period, but the first
chapter does discuss the broader history of coins in the archipelago, folding it into a larger discus-
sion of the relationships between currency, political authority, and economic growth.
The second monograph is Delmer Brown’s Money Economy in Medieval Japan: A Study in the Use
of Coins, published in 1951. Brown saw economic dynamism primarily in the thirteenth and six-
teenth centuries rather than those in between, and his lean account consistently presented the actions
and perspectives of elites. The book includes a very brief summary of early domestic coinages, but
quickly moves on to later centuries. The balance of Brown’s narrative devotes itself to the trans-
formation of Japan’s mining industry in the mid- sixteenth century, and he argued for its import-
ance in the development of a more mature money economy in the decades that followed. This puts
him at odds with Segal’s emphasis on earlier centuries and actors outside central institutions. The
newer work is the more robust, although Brown includes a fair amount of information on the
mining of copper, silver, and gold that is outside the purview of Segal’s study.