CASH AND ECONOMIC CHANGE 977
issued by the Tokugawa Bakufu after that date with appreciably less silver con-
tent than earlier ones. The Bakufu responded to a complaint from Tsushima, the
intermediary in trade with Korea, that Korean merchants were reluctant to accept
depreciated silver coins for high-quality ginseng, and decided to mint a special
high-quality coin for the Korea trade in I7IO. Trade with Japan then revived
and Japanese silver exports rose to an average of 8,700 pounds per year in the
I714-32 period, about 7 to 8 percent of the silver coins minted in that period
in Japan.
Expansion of that trade was limited by the Bakufu which restricted the amount
of silver that could be exported to Korea annually, 9AI8 pounds per year in 1686,
raised to 15,696 pounds in I700. In I7 14 Arai Hakuseki urged that the limit of
silver exports to trading partners like Korea, the Ryukyus, and China be reduced
still further to five or six thousand pounds a year, but it could not be enforced
in the Korea trade because the So family ofTsushima complained that the trade
was essential to maintain the welfare ofthe island and the prestige of Japan against
a foreign state. Because of the silver shortage, in 1736 the Bakufu was again
forced to reduce the silver content of coins to almost half of what they had been
in the mid-seventeenth century, and the policy of minting special, high silver-
content coins for the Korea trade proved too burdensome. In 1737, the Bakufu
then simply cut down the amount of silver it supplied to Tsushima han, and in
the I740S silver exports to Korea declined sharply and came to an end in 1752.
Thereafter, Tsushima financed the Korea trade with exports of copper. 12
In short, conditions inside Japan made it unlikely that Japan would have been
able to supply Korea's silver needs if King Yongjo had decided to replace all
copper cash with silver coins, but there was no reason why he could not have
minted silver coins and circulated them with copper as a reasonable means of
increasing the money supply.
Y6ngjo and Alternatives to Penny CashIn the end, after one of the most sophisticated discussions of alternative poli-
cies to solve the problem of currency shortage in the history of the dynasty, YOngjo
declined to adopt any of the new policies and decided only to approve the mint-
ing of more copper cash by various offices in the capital and provinces. 13 This
meant that Yongjo had been influenced not only by the negative views of some
of his high officials against the counterfeiting of silver coins, but by reports of
the opposition of "public opinion" to the use of multiple-denomination cash.
He also abandoned the idea of forcing the hoarded cash savings of rich specu-
lators onto the market by a total conversion of existing coins. It may well have
been "public opinion" that persuaded Yongjo to reject multiple-denomination
cash, but one must assume that "public opinion" represented the richer denizens
of the capital who would have resisted any kind of "cheap money" policy to
reduce the value of their savings and loans.
The rejection of multiple-denomination cash and silver coins left the minting