It's Friday! Hooray! (In Japan, anyway). So I thought I'd share with the rabble a little bit of a Japanese history lesson combined with some end-of-week silliness.

As I live and work in modern-day Japan, it's only logical that my salary be denominated in yen… But it has not always been this way, obviously, and I got to thinking… What if a time machine transported me back a little over 200 years and landed me smack in the middle of Edo period Japan. Of course, many of you already know that for roughly 200 years, up until Commodore Matthew Perry's visit to Japan in 1853, doors were closed to foreigners. But just for the sake of interest and argument, I thought it would be interesting to compare how much I would have earned had I been around during the Edo Period. Now, I'm not about to reveal to you exactly how much earn, but I will give you the tools to figure out how much YOU would have earned in feudal Japan, all else being equal.

In the Edo Period (1603-1868), people were generally not paid with money, but received a stipend in the form of rice. The amount of rice that it took to feed 1 person for 1 year was called 1 koku (石) which was about 278.3 litres of rice (it was later changed to 180L in 1891). A Hatamoto rank samurai would earn about 100 koku, while a Daimiyo would earn at least 1000.

Now, when British explorer William Adams sailed with the Dutch fleet, he landed in Japan aboard the Liefde in April, 1600, sick, hungry, accused of piracy by Jesuit Portuguese who were already in Japan, who advised the Japanese government to crucify Adams and his crew. (If this sounds like James Clavell's novel Shogun, it's because he loosely based his fictional account on real events. However, please don't get your Japanese history from Clavell -- it's pure fiction). Anyway, Adams was able to successfully plead his case, set "free", and quickly got in with the right people, and eventually, having learned sufficient Japanese was awarded the rank of hatamoto (bannerman) by the Shogun (warlord ruler) Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was given the two swords (katana, wakazashi) of a samurai, and appointed to serve as the Shogun's diplomat and trade minister. Anyway, I digress. The interesting thing is, that Adams was given a salary of 250 koku.

Anyway, cut to modern times. Today we don't measure rice in litres but in kilograms. According to a recent price check on the Internet, an average 10kg bag of rice costs about ￥3400/10kg. Which means, ￥340/1000g. Now, mind you, we're talking rough averages here. There's cheap rice and expensive rice. Asking: "How much is rice?" in Japan is a bit like asking: "How much is a car?" That all depends. But let's stick with averages here.

When I first calculated this, I was forced to look up the specific gravity of dry rice (which is 753 g/L). (If you failed science, this means that 1L of dry rice weighs 753 grams... And that is what I used to convert the price of rice per kilogram to price per liter). However, recently, I was able to find a better (hopefully more accurate figure) that tells me that 1 koku of rice (at a volume of 278L weighs approximately 150kg (or 330lb or 24 stone).

Therefore, if 10kg of rice costs ¥3400, 150kg of rice costs ¥51,000.

Now it's time to convert this into something a little more understandable for us Westerners. Using today's exchange rates, the cost for a litre of rice is approximately:

(1) For Japanese: 1石(koku) = ￥51,000 by today's standards.
(2) For Americans: 1石(koku) = $550.73 by today's standards.
(3) For Brits: 1石(koku) = £369.59 by today's standards.
(4) For EU members: 1石(koku) = €443.04 by today's standards.

Knowing this, all you need to do, is take your yearly salary and divide by either (1), (2), (3), (4), as your case may be.

For example, let's say you make $36,000 USD. $36,000 / $550.73 = 65.4 石(koku). You would earn 65.4 石(koku), which, while respectable, is still not of samurai rank.

SO, I don't know if you could be a hatamoto or not, but I suspect many of us still may have been fairly well off -- probably much better so than the larger part of the population. Somewhere I read that a few famous sumo rikishi earned somewhere around 50 koku, but I can't find the source on that. But everything is also relative. Just like today, a lot depends on lifestyle choices and individual expense differences. If you had a propensity for visiting houses of ill-repute, even a high salary may not be enough. One person I shared this with told me that he read somewhere of some individual earning 50 koku and living hand-to-mouth, having to do odd-jobs just to make ends meet. Whereas if a sumo earned 50 but already had his room and board covered, it would only be spending money. 50 koku in spending money only could have been huge. I don't know. Results will obviously vary.