ABSTRACT
THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR DEBASEMENT OF CURRENCY.-The successor of Shirakawa Rakuo was Matsudaira Nobuaki, who, though nominally only one of the Cabinet ministers, was really Prime Minister and copied his predecessor in everything. Nobuaki did not hold office long and was succeeded by Mizuno Tadanari, who had been one of the high officials of the Shogunate at the time of Tanuma, and whose administration was accompanied by much corruption. Since the time of Goto Shozaburo, who was appointed mint-master in the early years of the Tokugawa period, his family had held the same position generation after generation. In the era of Anyei (1772-80), Tanuma had granted the Goto of the day the privilege of wearing two swords like a samurai, an honour seldom extended to a commoner then, and the family head was given the same responsible position as his forefather. However, in 1810, Isaburo, the 8th head of the family, was found guilty of misappropriating public money, the house was extinguished by order of the Shogunate, and the position given to Goto Sanyemon, then a senior official of the silver mint, who had the happy knack of winning the favour of his superiors. In Matsudaira Nobuaki's time, Sanyemon often recommended to him a revision of currency, and his advice was rejected, but when he saw that Tadanari accepted suggestions and recommendations from merchants and others, who had axes of their own to grind, the wily mintmaster perceived an opening for himself, and suggested a revision of currency in the form of a debasement, as a means of relieving the Shogunate of its chronic financial difficulties. His recommendation was accepted and the plan carried into effect accordingly; the quality of the coinage was greatly debased and the currency system thrown into chaos. In the Tokugawa period, whenever the currency was revised, any profit that resulted was credited to the treasury as an item of extraordinary revenue, and in all cases of revision the main object of the Shogunate was financial profit to itself, with the natural result that there were considerable " pickings" for officials and those engaged in the bullion business. This maladministration of currency by the Tokugawa Shogunate had been continuously practised from the Genroku era, and matters went from bad to worse after the revision
of Meiwa and Anyei, because, as one result of it, the volume of currency circulating, especially small coins, was considerably increased, which gave more chances to the officials concerned, as well as the Shogunate, to line their own pockets out of the revision. It is hardly necessary to say that such maladministration on the part of the Shogunate and the evil practices of the officials had many bad results.
