Job Discussion Forums

[JimDunlop2]

Here is my Friday silliness thread...

Of course, up until Admiral Perry's visit to Japan in the mid 19th century, doors were closed to foreigners. But just for the sake of interest and argument, I thought it would be interesting to compare how much today's English teachers in Japan may have earned had they been around during the Edo Period.

For those of you who don't care about my calculations and math, just skip to the bottom of the post. Otherwise, I hope there aren't any mistakes in my math -- those of you who are good at that sort of thing can check my numbers if you wish.

In the Edo Period, people were generally not paid with money, but received a stipend in the form of rice. The amount of rice that it took to feed 1 person for 1 year was called 1 koku (石) which was about 180 litres of rice. A hatamoto rank samurai would earn about 100 koku, while a Daimiyo would earn at least 1000.

Anyway, today we don't measure rice in litres but in kilograms. According to a recent price check on the Internet, an average 10kg bag of rice costs about ￥3400/10kg. Which means, ￥340/1000g.

Now, the specific gravity of rice is 753 g/L. (If you failed science, this means that 1L of dry rice weighs 753 grams so we must use this number to convert the price of rice per kilogram to price per liter). So, if 1000g of rice costs ￥340, 753g of rice (which equals 1 litre) costs ￥256.02

So, rice today costs ￥256.02 / L

Therefore, 1石(koku) = 180L * ￥256.02 = ￥46,083.60 by today's standards.

Knowing this, assuming a yearly salary of ￥4,000,000 (I make a bit more than an eikaiwa teacher), means that I earn 86.8石(koku)

If you ARE an eikaiwa teacher who makes ￥250,000 per month, that means that your yearly salary of ￥3,000,000 is worth 65.1石(koku).

SO, I guess I couldn't be a hatamoto, but I would be well off -- probably much better so than the larger part of the population. Somewhere I read that a few famous sumo rikishi earned somewhere around 50 koku, but I can't find the source on that.

Anyway, to figure out any salary in koku, just take the yearly salary in yen and divide by 46,083.6 to get the answer.

Just something to think about when you go out for beer and supper this long weekend...

Enjoy yourselves everyone!

[Sweetsee]

Howdy Jim,

Best be keeping your head down if I come around, or lose it!


Enjoy,
s

[JimDunlop2]

[Glenski]

Sorry, Jim, the math is off.

Dry rice is 0.89gm/ml, http://vsack.homepage.t-online.de/rfc_faq.html
so a liter of dry rice = 890 gm

At your market figures of 3400 yen/10kg, that makes...

303 yen per dry liter of rice (not 256.02 yen)
So, your annual "sustenance figure" of 180 liters x 303 yields a slightly higher figure of 54,540 yen for 1 koku.

This means you could have earned
3 million/54,540 = 55 koku with standard eikaiwa wages
3.6 million / 54,540 = 66 koku as a JET ALT
5-7 million / 54,540 = 92 to 128 koku as an average entry level university prof. (there's that hatamoto samurai rank, finally!!)

[Sweetsee]

Sorry Jim but what I meant was that I would've been Samurai.

Enjoy,
s

[JimDunlop2]

Sweetsee: Oh, ok.. Now I get it. But just do realize that if, as a samurai, you chose to take my head, you would probably be in a world of trouble... See, someone who makes over 50 koku a year would be a rather influential and respected member of society. Going around arbitrarily beheading people like that would have consequences. I suspect, that shortly after you would be asked to commit seppuku by your daimiyo...

Glenski: Thank you for that. For whatever reason the s.g. figure I found for dry rice was different. Don't know why. But anyway, the principle would stay the same.

[Nismo]

You're thinking about it the wrong way. If you were an English teacher in the Edo period, you would probably be impoverished and living in Nagasaki. You also, probably, would have spoken portuguese, and would have earned a better living having taught that language to Japanese merchants.

Rice, also, is easily acquired, now, because of mass production techniques, so using that as a measure is pointless - which is why Japanese yen is not based off of a huge reserve of rice locked in a vault somewhere. If all English teachers were in the elite class, all salarymen would be hatamoto, the value of rice would experience rapid inflation, and you'd be back down in the village with the peasants wading through the rice paddies.