Commerce into National Wealth: The Mercantilist Reform of Tanuma Okitsugu

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, in Edo. The rōjū Tanuma Okitsugu was putting forward, one after another, policies that overturned the common sense of the time, toward rebuilding the shogunal finances.

Departing from the traditional way of relying on increased yields of tax rice, he sought to turn the vitality of commerce and the money economy into revenue.

Coin rather than rice; commerce, not agriculture alone. Okitsugu's ideas, in an Edo shogunate that made agrarianism its official stance, were strikingly different and advanced.

Okitsugu officially recognized the kabu-nakama, the merchants' trade associations, and in exchange for granting them a monopoly on business, had them pay levies.

It was a mechanism to control commerce while gaining a stable income from it. Further, he made copper and marine products monopolies, and actively expanded foreign trade through Nagasaki.

These policies, which built the profit of commerce into the shogunal revenue, were an attempt to cut the finances loose from rice.

Okitsugu also turned his eye to the development of the northern Ezo (present-day Hokkaidō).

He explored the possibility of trade with Russia and dispatched survey parties, seeking to turn a vast undeveloped land into a new source of revenue.

For domestic development, he advanced the large-scale reclamation of Lake Inba and Lake Tega, seeking new paddy fields.

In the currency system too, he issued a counting silver coin, the nanryō-nishu-gin, aiming at the rationalization of the economy.

Okitsugu's field of view was wider, and looked further, than any shogunal retainer of the time.

Okitsugu's series of policies looked ahead to the transition from an agricultural society to a commercial one.

To rebuild the stagnant shogunal finances with the power of commerce and money — that idea ran nearly a century ahead of the road that modern Japan would later walk.

But amid the deep-rooted values that made rice the basis of wealth, Okitsugu's reforms also drew backlash as 'money-grubbing' and 'bribe-politics.

' Because they were too advanced, Okitsugu's attempts would be buried before they could sufficiently bear fruit.

Even so, the stone Okitsugu cast pointed toward the future of the Japanese economy.