RMS


The prices given in the text (but not in the footnotes and Appendix) were
recorded before the War inflation began. The War was followed by a
severe financial crisis. Professor Nasu wrote to me during the summer of
1921:

"You are very wise to leave the figures as they stood. It is useless
to try to correct them, because they are still changing. The price of
rice, which did not exceed 15 yen per koku when you were making your
research work, exceeded 50 yen in 1919, and is now struggling to
maintain the price of 25 yen. Taking at 100 the figures for the years
1915 or 1916--fortunately there is not much difference between these
two years--the prices of six leading commodities reached in 1919 an
average of about 250. After 1919 the prices of some commodities went
still higher, but mostly they did not change very much; on the other
hand, recently the prices of many commodities--among them rice and raw
silk especially--have been coming down and this downward movement is
gradually extending to all other commodities. From these
considerations I deduce that the index number of general commodities
may be safely taken as 200 when your book appears. _The reader of your
book has simply to double the figures given by you--that is the
figures of_ 1915 _and_ 1916--_in order to get a rough estimate of
present prices._"

Where exact statements of area and yield are necessary, as in the
study of the intense agriculture of Japan, local measures are
preferable to our equivalents in awkward fractions. Further, the
measures used in this book are easily remembered, and no serious study
of Japanese agriculture on the spot is possible without remembering
them. While, however, Japanese currency, weights and measures have
been uniformly used, equivalents have been supplied at every place in
the book where their omission might be reasonably considered to
interfere with easy reading. The following tables are restricted to
currency, weights and measures mentioned in the book.


MONEY[9]

_Yen_ = ro

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