Rice broker

A network of rice brokers centered at the Dôjima Rice Exchange in Osaka represents an Edo period precursor to the modern banking system, and the first instance of a futures market (延べ米, nobemai) in Japan. Emerging in the Genroku period (1688-1704) and developing and expanding over the course of the 18th century, rice brokers operated a network of storehouses where customers - mainly samurai, whose stipends were paid in koku of rice and not directly in gold or silver - could store and access their wealth. A system of credit was also introduced allowing customers to pay for goods and services not in gold or silver currency, but with bills of exchange - these were pieces of paper that functioned, perhaps, not entirely unlike a personal check, which the merchant could then take to a rice broker and exchange for the actual value in gold, silver, or rice.

Rice brokerages operated in Kyoto three centuries prior, albeit in a different manner. Yet, rice brokerages evidently continued in one form or another since then, and existed prior to the 1697 establishment of the Dôjima Rice Exchange, since Ihara Saikaku, in his 1688 publication Nihon eitaigura lists off the brokerage firms of Osaka's Nakanoshima district as follows: Yodoya, Tsukaguchiya, Uwajimaya, Bizenya, Kamiya, Kônoikeya, Kuwanaya, Otsukaya, Shioya, Higoya, Fukaeya, Kiya, Hizenya, and Oka.