Isn't This No Way to Live?
Wasn't this getting to be an impossible place to live?
Japan had people with brains too, of course. It was only natural that they gradually began to sense the danger in Daehan's trajectory.
"Your Majesty! The countryside is emptying out, little by little!"
"This is a disaster!"
The lamentations of his ministers echoed through the Kyoto Gosho.
"Haah…."
But the Emperor had no clever solution either. They needed to repay the debts and reclaim the development rights, but where in the world would that kind of money come from?
The villages of Japan were now home to nothing but the old and the powerless. Most people were flocking to the cities or clamoring for work in the mines.
Since the Daehan Company had set up in Naniwa, it wasn't just miners being hired — porters, laborers, and people for every odd job were being taken on by the bushelful.
"Ha… The people certainly are working plenty hard…."
"Yet our tax revenue refuses to grow."
Japan's tax system consisted of three levies: the land tax, the labor tax, and the goods tax.
The land tax, collected in grain from farmland, was the one dwindling before their eyes.
And yet, with farming abandoned, there was no food shortage at all. Rather, the supply was growing — a truly bizarre situation.
"Your Majesty, I believe the tax system must be changed."
"Changed how? Speak plainly."
"Your servant humbly submits that it would be right to collect based on the number of heads."
The officials were picturing a poll tax. Of course, instituting one would require a survey of land and population beforehand — but did they think that far ahead?
"Implement it at once!"
"Yes, Your Majesty!"
And so a tax reform was rolled out recklessly, straight from the capital. There was no preparation period whatsoever. Officials and samurai simply began roaming the countryside, collecting taxes as they pleased.
Before long, in a farming village near Naniwa, close to the capital—
"Nari! Didn't you collect from me just a few days ago?"
The farmer was utterly beside himself with indignation. Had he not paid his taxes only recently?
"What nonsense! Hand over your taxes this instant!"
"An official came by back then and took them himself!"
"What was that? Are you defying the Emperor's command?"
It was the official who flew into a rage instead. Someone had already collected taxes in his district? And this peasant expected him to just believe that?
CLANG!
"You want to die, is that it?"
"N-no, of course not…."
The farmer genuinely felt he could not go on living like this. He should have gotten himself a job at the mines ages ago….
"Here… here it is…."
"Hmph! You should have brought it out at once!"
The farmer reluctantly produced the money he had hidden away. It was meant to buy his daughter a present next month, and the unfairness of it burned in his chest.
SLAP!
"Ugh…."
The official seized the money as though robbing him and struck him across the cheek, and the tears came surging up unbidden.
'Fine. Fine, then. I'll go somewhere you bastards will never find.'
No population census had ever been conducted, so there were no registers; the districts had never been properly delineated either, so officials simply wandered wherever their fancy took them, squeezing taxes out of the people. That was the real problem.
And it was no different on the shogunate's side.
Anyone who had ever displeased them could expect visits at all hours, tax collectors and harassment arriving hand in hand.
"Damn it all! We can't go on living like this!"
"The rice paddies are useless to us now anyway, aren't they?"
"Let's build ourselves a place up in the mountains — hide up there at night, come down to work by day!"
"Let's go!"
One by one, people began slipping out of the state's sight and vanishing into the mountains. And anywhere near the capital region, mountains fit for hiding in were practically limitless.
Little by little, the population living on Japan's flatlands dwindled. Everyone was holed up in the mountains, living in hiding.
Naturally, the Japanese government began sending men out to hunt them down, the people kept running, and the country began sliding into absolute chaos.
Watching it all unfold, we—
"What in the world is all that ruckus?"
"Hard to say?"
Even today, hundreds of people hauled in from the mountains were being herded off en masse. What crime had they committed? And where were they being taken, to be locked up like that?
"Are they criminals?"
"Could there have been some kind of uprising?"
"Hmm, doesn't look like it? No blood anywhere, and everything's a bit too tidy."
"But that's an awful lot of people, isn't it? Where could they be taking them all?"
And more to the point — were they even going to feed them properly while locked up? What was this feeling? A country about to flip upside down, if you asked me.
"This won't interfere with our business, will it?"
"No. There isn't a single official who'd dare come onto our mine property and stick his nose in!"
Back when we first started, there had been an official bold enough — or stupid enough — to show up with samurai in tow, demanding to collect taxes, but after I came out personally and crossed blades with them a few times, they stopped coming anywhere near.
And the nicknames started spreading again. Kurokin — or the Ohana-hime on my back, as they called it. The people at the mine who adored me called me Hime, while everyone else used the other two.
"Tell the kids not to go anywhere alone."
"Yes. They always travel in groups in dangerous areas. We'll make sure there's nothing for you to worry about."
They went around without armor like proper company employees, which worried me a little, but they all carried Holy Water, so I figured they'd manage somehow.
Once Daehan's luxury goods and household wares began flowing in, the aristocrats' lives grew comfortable — but the common people of Japan found it harder and harder to survive.
And so they began to fall into religion.
"Kurokin will overturn this country and make it a good one to live in."
"That's right! Let's all pray together!"
Gatherings of people praying together in someone's back room.
"Jesus will deliver us!"
"Let us pray together and bide our time!"
"Hallelujah!"
The same was happening in the tiny churches built by the foreign missionaries who had come to Japan.
"Amitabha…. You need only recite the nenbutsu."
"Truly? Even someone like me, who cannot read the sutras and has no money to enter a temple and train?"
"Yes. If your faith is sincere, the Buddha will save you."
In strange Buddhist halls too, a strange faith began to spread among the poor and the desperate.
It was the year 3735 of the Daehan calendar. I had opened the Japan branch office and stayed for about five years, watching and waiting — and something interesting was brewing.
"So they've turned themselves into a proper bandit gang trying to pay off the debt, huh?"
"They say everyone runs the moment they spot a samurai on the road these days. Even the wealthy are hiding their money wherever they can."
The Hojo family, which still owed us so much, seemed to be scraping money together like their lives depended on it. Word was they were squeezing even their own samurai households dry.
No wonder they'd managed to repay two million and fifty thousand ryō of gold over the past eight years. Less than half the debt remained now.
"And here I wondered where they were digging up all that gold. Genuinely impressive, honestly? What's their plan for finding loyal retainers later, though?"
"I suspect they've written off everyone they've wronged and are just grabbing whatever they can reach?"
And that, of course, was a vicious cycle. The samurai class and the nobility were the ones with power.
When money was extracted from them by someone stronger and higher, what they would do was exactly the same — take it back from those weaker than themselves, squeezing and exploiting in turn, as if it had been done to them first.
"The people really are having a rough time of it, aren't they?"
"Yes, absolutely. And that's why stranger things are starting to happen."
According to what I'd heard, salvation-in-this-world worship and doomsday faiths were spreading.
"About me?"
"Yes."
This wasn't about the Sky Faith — it was about me personally. Kurokin, they said, was the savior: the one who would end this hellish world and usher in a new age.
"I know the nickname's been around since the old days, but really? Why bother?"
"There's certainly the destroyer aspect to it, but I think it's also influenced by the fact that so many people now earn their living on wages from the company."
Ah, I see. The destroyer-god image passed down in oral tradition and legends, fused with the image of the one who now fed them and gave them good lives — so they'd made me the object of a salvation cult.
What do I do about this? I had no intention of doing any such thing.
"And Christianity and Buddhism are both spreading like wildfire too."
"Ah! So it's not just me, then?"
Apparently, as long as there was a god, they'd take him as a savior? Was life really that hard?
"Are our workers having a hard time too?"
"They'd be robbed the moment they went home, so a lot of people just live at the mines permanently now."
Ah, right. The officials can't set foot in the mines, so people have simply put down roots there?
"Some have even moved entirely into the tunnels and are living inside them."
"Hang on, isn't that dangerous?"
Some parts of mines give off gas. Coal especially releases volatile gases. A perfect recipe for suffocation.
"We try to talk them out of it, but they go in anyway. What can we do?"
"Then fence off our territory with a nice high wall and build proper housing inside. People need somewhere to rest easy if they're going to live."
"Understood."
It wasn't any great undertaking, so if we did that much, everyone would surely live contentedly.
Work seemed to be settling into place, and I was about to leave the rest to the kids when someone claiming to be an envoy of the Emperor of Japan suddenly came calling.
"I understand you are the head of the Daehan Company."
There was technically a company president, but major matters always climbed the ladder up to me in the end — so it wasn't an inaccurate description.
"That's right. What business do you have?"
"Once the debt is repaid in full, will you withdraw from this country?"
"Yes. That's the agreement."
At the outset of the treaty, we had agreed to take resource development rights in lieu of interest. So once they paid the interest or repaid the debt, our justification for staying here would evaporate.
"The debt stands at forty-one million, two hundred and ninety thousand ryō of silver, I'm told."
"Yes. The debt as it stood when the treaty was signed."
"I have brought the money."
Hah. Look at these guys. I knew they'd try something. See that clever little brain at work?
"And how much would that be?"
"One ryō of silver is one thousand won in Daehan, I'm told? We have prepared forty-one billion, two hundred and ninety million won."
"Wow! Magnificent!"
"Hahaha. It was gathered with great difficulty."
Funny, that? You think it's going to be that easy?
"Except that figure is from the year 3726, isn't it?"
"I beg your pardon?"
Why would a debtor ever fear the creditor? This is what happens when your contract lacks fine print, my friends!
"You're settling the contract, so the interest keeps accruing, doesn't it? Our arrangement was that in exchange for the development rights, we'd forgo interest payments and freeze the principal — that was the deal, no?"
Where do you get off trying to substitute a figure from years ago?
"It's the year 3735 now, so the calculation has to come to forty-nine million, three hundred and fifty thousand ryō of silver."
"There's no such thing!"
Oh? Look at this guy? Where do you get off raising your voice at me?
"And there's one more thing."
"What more could there be!"
"The money we sank into developing the mines."
"Why should we pay for that?"
Hm? Are you asking me to gut you? Because I'm rather good at that?
"You handed over the mining development rights because you couldn't pay the interest. We invest our own money to develop your land and feed your people — and now you're telling me you intend to eat the money we spent there for free?"
They could have just repaid the debt like honest men. Why did they have to make everything so much bigger?
"That was your doing, was it not?"
"No, it wasn't. You sold us the development rights — that's why we did it. Get the order of events straight, please."
The whole business started because these people had no money and sold us the development rights, and we, having no choice, came in to recoup our costs ourselves.
You don't get to reverse the sequence, you know.
"Our mine development cost roughly five million ryō of gold, you see."
Hm? That sounds about right, doesn't it? I'd thrown out a number I figured they couldn't pay anyway. Feeling-wise it was more like we'd spent around fifty thousand ryō…
Eh, who cares? Nobody can check anyway.
"That much!? No — wait, yes, quite right! Then the value of what was already extracted from those mines must be deducted, mustn't it!"
Trying to shave off something, anything, are we? Not a chance.
"Most of it went out as wages to the workers — so didn't Japan earn plenty from that? If anything, shouldn't we be collecting more? It was our money flooding into Japan, after all?"
"Th-that is…."
Work that brain as hard as you like. There's no way to calculate who received what and where — you won't even be able to guess whether my word or yours is closer to the truth.
True, a great deal of the wages had gone to the people — but we'd recouped nearly all of it selling Daehan goods back to them. In fact, with the gold and silver the noble houses kept hauling in to buy silk and jewels, we were turning quite the profit.