This episode we close out discussion of this reign with a bit of a grab bag. There is the minting of new coins, new letters to write Japanese, board games, and more.

For more, check out our blogpost: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-146

Rough Transcript

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 146: Coins, Letters, Games, and More

The large audience hall was filled with nobles, sitting in pairs across from each other. Throughout the hall, the roof and walls reverberated with the sounds of numerous stone markers being placed on painted wooden tables—or more appropriately, game boards. It was accompanied by the sound of dice clattering. At the far end of the hall was the royal presence, where his majesty could likewise join in the entertainment—with someone of sufficient standing, of course.

Throughout the day there were bursts of joy and frustration throughout the hall. In some instances, one could see two players sharing in the joy and love of the game. In other cases, political rivals stared each other down, neither one willing to give away any strategic advantage. Any smiles there were merely a mask. And yet, no matter how hard one tried, there was only so much you could do. Ultimately, your fate was in the hands of the dice, though you could certainly do your best to nudge it here and there.

And so they continued. As they played, small wagers were made between players. At the conclusion of their match, each player could find another opponent, and see if their luck held out. Victory was desired, but at the very least one didn't want to be embarrassed. As such, losing gracefully was just as important as winning with humility. Sure, there were the petty stakes that were gambled here and there, but the real stakes were embedded in the politics of the court. That was a game that everyone was playing, except that there was no board, and the rules were often merely suggestions, at best.

This episode we are going to close out the reign of Ohoama, aka Temmu Tenno. It has been a while getting here—but then again, Ohoama's reign is the best documented so far, almost like the entire Chronicle has built up to this point. We have spent about a dozen episodes on this reign—not including the four before that discussing the Jinshin no Ran.

During that time we've talked about how Ohoama continued the Ritsuryou experiment, while at the same time shaping it into something that was even more directly under his control. A lot of this appears to have been done with the mostly willing consent of a good part of the archipelago.

That may have been because of a few different things. For one, all of this was justified through the philosophical underpinnings of the continent. This is the new knowledge that the court had been devouring for over a century, and so I suspect that none of it seemed particularly surprising or out of place. Furthermore, it seems that Ohoama's actions may have appealed to some of the more middle-tier elites; those for whom the idea of a government stipend was quite appealing.

There was also the external threat of Silla and Tang. Though in reality, Silla was in conflict with the Tang dynasty, up until the conclusion of the Silla-Tang War, around 676. In truth, the Tang court wouldn't recognize Sillan sovereignty south of the Taedong river until 736, so there were still tensions. However, early on in the reign there was at least the thought that hostilities could spill over onto the archipelago.

And then there are all of the projects. The designation of national temples, the beginning of a national history project, the founding of a permanent capital city, and the creation of a formal code—the Asuka Kiyomihara Code.

Compared to all of that, the topics of this episode really are some miscellaneous stuff that I didn't have anywhere else to put, but wanted to bring to light anyway.

First, we'll talk about the minting of coins, and what that meant. Once again, this is really neat because we actually have some coins that appear to be from this time frame, providing what might be a direct relationship between what is written down and what we have in the archaeological record.

Then we'll touch on another project of Ohoama's—this one less successful than some of the others we've discussed. This was an attempt to create a new writing system specific to the Japanese language. Remember, at this point literate people in the archipelago were using kanji to write everything down, and for the most part they were using kanbun—so Sinitic characters and grammar, with occasional use of characters purely for their phonetic qualities when they absolutely had to spell something out. Eventually this would evolve into the syllabaries of katakana and hiragana, but there were several false starts before that, and we'll talk about what was being attempted during Ohoama's reign.

Beyond those court projects we'll talk about some of the kami and Buddhist related rituals, especially as they related to growing merit and attempting to protect the state and its people from disasters—natural or otherwise. And then there are various omens, and just a few edicts that were more geared towards the court but are still fun, like when Ohoama forced the entire court to join him for a day of… board games. I guess when you are the sovereign and trying to set up a game day, scheduling is suddenly not so big of a problem.

So that's what we are going to cover. We are skipping around throughout the reign, and so while I'll mention dates here and there, I'll try not to get too bogged down with the exact dates unless it really matters.

First off: coins. We are going to start somewhere in the middle, on the 15th day of the 4th month of 683. It is here that we see a note that Ohoama decreed that copper coins would be used, and not silver. Remember that a silver mine had been discovered in Tsushima back in 674. At that time we know that there were silver coins being made, but in 683 it looks like they were changing from silver to copper. But three days later, they reversed the decision to completely cancel the silver coins, so they presumably had both silver and copper coins.

Coins are interesting for several reasons. For one, coins often help us to date various collections—if they are distinctive enough. They can be quite helpful in telling us that a particular archaeological assemblage is almost certainly from sometime after the coins had begun to be circulated. After all, if you unearth a stratum of an archeological dig and you find a penny dated to 1912, you can be reasonably confident that that layer was last exposed on or after 1912, unless time travel was at play. There are some exceptions where animals or tree roots or other forces can disturb the layering, but that's why archeologists carefully pay attention to soil features.

That isn't to say that all coins of the time had clear dates on them. In fact, the oldest coins we have in the archipelago are something called "Mumon Ginsen"—literally unmarked silver coins. They are found in various assemblages and thought to have originated under Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou. The silver from Tsushima would have likely been used for this. For many reasons it is unclear if these were minted by the state or if they were privately minted and circulated.

The copper coin mentioned in Ohoama's record in the Nihon Shoki would appear to be what is known as a Fuhonsen coin, which we also have extant examples of. These are round copper coins with a square hole in the middle, as was common on the continent. The previous unmarked silver coins were just small circles of solid silver. In contrast, the Fuhonsen bear the characters "FU-HON": FU, or "Tomi", means wealth, and HON, or "moto", means something like base or basis. "SEN" just refers to the fact that it is a coin. So the coin represents the basis of wealth. They are just under an inch in diameter, and 1.5 millimeters thick. While primarily copper, they do have traces of antimony, silver, and bismuth. The use of copper was likely because of its lower melting point, which would have been easier to cast with.

So it seems that these were the new copper coins mentioned in the Chronicles, and the intent was originally to completely replace any silver currency. I suspect that they quickly realized that they could not easily replace all of the silver, and so the older silver coins were probably still in circulation—though I don't know if any new ones were being minted.

We don't exactly know how the coins were used. They weren't being used to pay taxes or similar things—that was still all being handled in rice, silk, cloth, and labor. They might have been used by the government to pay individuals, who would then exchange them for goods, but they were probably not used very often between individuals. There is even some suggestion that they had a more ritual meaning.

Coins of a similar shape—round with a square hole in the center—go back to at least 350 BCE on the continent, and were quite common by the time of the Han dynasty. The round hole allowed them to be placed on strings—you'll often see references to strings of cash. In the Qin dynasty, a string was meant to be a superunit, made up of 1000 coins. Merchants and others operating at some scale ...