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Rice was also essential to the development of the Besshi mine, which centered on a lode Sumitomo discovered in 1690 and grew into one of the world’s greatest copper mines. Under the kai-ukemai system, the shogunate provided incentives for copper mining, copper being one of the country’s key exports at the time, by selling 6,000 koku of the rice it collected in taxes at a reduced price as food for mine workers. The price Sumitomo paid for this rice varied from year to year, but in some years the company was able to buy rice through the program for over 40% off the market price.
In the opening years of 1700, the Besshi mine employed some 3,000 workers, including 100 people involved in management, and workers who performed tasks at the mine like extracting the ore, draining waste water, and sorting the extracted ore. It took about 10,000 koku of rice a year to feed all of these people, so 6,000 koku of discounted rice from the shogunate accounted for 60% of that total. Sumitomo sold this rice to its workers at a slight discount off the market rate, and the difference was counted as profit for the mine, making the kai-ukemai system primarily a way of subsidizing the mining operation. As a further advantage of this system for the mine’s cash flow, the shogunate asked that this discounted rice be paid for 10 months after delivery. Moreover, the ability to make advance wage payments in rice also made it easier for the mine to hire the workers it needed.
This subsidiary was in a way quintessentially Japanese, tied as it was to the very sustenance of people’s lives. But it eventually grew to be a burden, despite Sumitomo’s repeated petitions for better terms, as the program became less and less favorable due to the shogunate’s deteriorating finances. Finally the policy of supplying rice to the mine, which had lasted for some 170 years from 1702, ended altogether following the shogunate’s demise, a development that ushered in a tough period for the mine’s operators. |
