The harvest of 1879 was quite a sight to behold.
First, the newly reclaimed land reached 1,000 Dessiatine, doubling our cultivated land compared to last year.
On the newly reclaimed land, we planted Oats as per our experience so far, harvesting 1,800 tons or 110,000 Pood of Oats.
We also increased the rice cultivation area to 500 Dessiatine.
The yield per Dessiatine increased even further, exceeding 3 tons per Dessiatine, resulting in a harvest of a whopping 1,500 tons of rice.
Additionally, we harvested 500 tons of winter wheat.
This was achieved by planting winter wheat in all the fields where harvesting had finished last year—except for the hay fields, which are harvested multiple times from a single planting—and harvesting it in the summer.
For hay, we harvested Timothy and Alfalfa, which have high productivity and nutritional value, totaling approximately 500,000 Pood.
This amount was enough to supply the Russian Army with plenty left over to feed the cattle and horses raised on Mikhail Yankovsky’s farm.
With this, our Shijimi Cooperative succeeded in supplying all the fodder and hay consumed by the military horses of the Russian Army stationed in Primorsky Krai for a year, while also providing the grain consumed by the Army and Navy.
We delivered 450,000 Pood of hay to the Russian Army at 20 Kopeyka per Pood, 100,000 Pood of Oats at 40 Kopeyka per Pood, and 30,000 Pood of wheat at 60 Kopeyka per Pood, earning a total of 148,000 Ruble.
At the same time, we supplied the rice consumed by all the Joseon people living in the Primorsky Krai region, leaving a surplus of over 1,200 tons of rice.
Naturally, the next goal was to sell this surplus rice.
Yuli Briner asked.
As a merchant, he seemed most curious about whether the surplus rice would actually be worth money outside of Russia.
“Will Japan really buy this rice?”
“Japan has a chronic shortage of rice, so they will buy it. The question is how high a price we can sell it for.”
“What is the current price of rice in Japan?”
“In Japan, rice is traded using a unit called a Seok, and one Seok is about 150kg. Currently, trading is centered in Osaka or Tokyo, and it’s said to be about 7 to 10 Yen per Seok. In Russian Ruble, that’s roughly 9 to 13 Ruble.”
“If we assume the lowest price of about 9 Ruble, then 1,200 tons would be about 8,000 Seok, so would that bring in 72,000 Ruble?”
“It will be roughly that much, but it might be difficult for us to get the full price from the start.”
“That’s quite substantial.”
“Since we earned about 150,000 Ruble in Russia, this is almost half that amount. Moreover, a large market like Japan guarantees sales, so we don’t have to worry about market outlets no matter how much more we cultivate. That’s why I put so much effort into rice cultivation.”
“I see that the Koryo-saram go crazy for rice; can’t we sell it to Joseon?”
“If we sell it to Joseon, we’ll only get about a third of the price.”
“Is the price difference that severe?”
“The reason Japan is demanding that Joseon open its ports right now is precisely to buy rice.”
“You said Wonsan would open next year, right?”
“Yes, it’s said they decided to open it in May of next year.”
“Is there no way for us to get involved?”
“Japanese merchants have small capital scales, so if we utilize that, a way might open up. But Yul, you look different from the start; if you say you’re a Japanese merchant, will the Joseon officials believe you?”
“Isn’t that just a matter of how you play the part?”
No matter how much Japan lacked rice, the only places capable of handling 8,000 Seok of rice were the Osaka or Tokyo markets.
Instead of Osaka, we went to Yokohama Port, located below Tokyo, where foreigners frequented a bit more.
Yuli Briner was more suited for this kind of transaction than the still-young me, and he stepped forward for the negotiations.
“Pretend you don’t know Japanese.”
“Why?”
“If they know you speak Japanese, they might look down on you instead.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“If you can speak Japanese, they might treat you like a low-class white drifter who came to Japan just to scrape together some money. So don’t even use Russian; use Germany. That is the way to appear most dignified to the Japanese.”
“Damn it, then all that time I spent studying Japanese was for nothing.”
Over the past two years, Yuli Briner had studied the Joseon language and Japanese quite diligently.
Yuli Briner’s language acquisition ability was quite high.
While he learned the Joseon language relatively quickly since there were plenty of Joseon people in Sidimi, he could only manage basic Japanese because I was the only person who could speak it.
Instead, he learned the Tokyo standard dialect for Japanese, but his Joseon language was heavily mixed with the Hamgyeong-do dialect.
“Regardless, even if you understand the Japanese they speak, pretend you don’t and leave the interpreting to me.”
After arriving at Yokohama Port with 8,000 Seok of rice on a ship borrowed from Hong Kong, we spread the word that we had brought rice.
When people were bewildered and couldn’t believe we had brought rice from somewhere that wasn’t even Joseon, we provided them with a few sacks as samples.
Only after seeing the goods for themselves did they believe that what was loaded on our ship was indeed rice.
The merchants of East Asia in this era, whether in Korea or Japan, were full of people trying to swindle their counterparts; the only exceptions were the great Chinese merchants of Shanghai or Hong Kong.
Noticing that the cargo owner was a Westerner and that I, the interpreter, was just a kid, Japanese merchants swarmed in to try and swindle us, but we were not that easy to push around.
“What? You’ll give 3 Yen per Seok and take all 8,000 Seok? Have you lost your mind, or do we look like fools to you? Do you really think we haven’t looked into the price of rice in Japan?”
“You’re saying it’s a loss if we can’t sell it here and have to turn back? Do you have any idea how much wealth my master has? Why would he be so desperate over some coal costs that he’d hand it over at such a bargain price? Stop that nonsense; it’s not worth a half-penny. If it doesn’t sell here, we’ll go to Osaka. If it doesn’t sell there, we’ll go to Nagasaki or Choshu. If it still doesn’t sell, we’d rather throw it into the sea than sell it at that price.”
Given my fluent Japanese, the gathered people seemed to think of me as Yuli Briner’s Japanese servant.
However, seeing me wearing a fairly decent-looking suit, they seemed to think of me as a servant who received considerable treatment.
The year 1879 was exactly ten years after the Japanese government designated Tokyo as the capital and moved it from Kyoto.
Since the Tokugawa Bakufu era, Tokyo—then called Edo—had already been one of the world’s largest cities with a population exceeding one million.
Since the relocation of the capital, the population had increased even further, leading to a significant shortage of rice to feed them.
Even though they had begun taking steps toward modernization, it had only been about ten years since the fall of the Edo Bakufu.
Remnants of the old era still remained everywhere in society.
The only things that looked different from before were that the men’s hairstyle, the Zonmage, had disappeared and changed to short hair; the warriors no longer carried swords; and people rode rickshaws instead of palanquins.
Actually, the Zonmage hadn’t completely disappeared either; hairstyles where the front of the head was shaved were still quite visible among people who looked like the poor lower class.
I thought such hairstyles had completely disappeared with the Danbalryeong in Japan after the Meiji era, but it was unexpected to see similar hairstyles still remaining among the lower class.
It seemed that there were people who were not yet used to Western-style short hair, or perhaps they couldn’t afford it.
Therefore, in my eyes as a history enthusiast, Japan in this era looked closer to a pre-modern state than a modern one.
Yuli Briner and I disembarked but didn’t bother looking for a hotel or lodging, staying on the ship instead.
Considering the situation in Japan where there were few hotels of European standard, the cabins on the ship were actually more comfortable for us to live in.
Although the ship swayed slightly with the waves, this was no problem for Yuli and me, who had spent plenty of time on ships.
It was also good that when we first borrowed the ship in Hong Kong, we had selected one properly equipped with cabins for us to stay in.
While we were watching the streets of Yokohama from the ship like that, a well-dressed man boarded the ship and spoke.
“If it’s 8,000 Seok, we shouldn’t be talking on a ship like this; let’s go to a restaurant and talk. Several Misang of Tokyo are already waiting for you.”
The man brought two additional rickshaws besides the one he arrived in.
We nodded, disembarked, and took the rickshaws to a restaurant in the city.
Yuli Briner worried that it might be an attempt to kidnap us, but I reassured him.
“Right now, the Japanese cannot easily harm a white person from the West. So you can rest assured. Besides, if things go wrong, we have guns, so what is there to worry about?”
I showed him the two Frontier Bulldog Revolvers I had inside my coat.
Yuli, who knew my fighting and marksmanship skills, finally felt at ease and boarded the rickshaw as I said.
While Japan looked like a pre-modern state when glimpsed from the ship, passing through the streets on a rickshaw, I saw newspapers written in Japanese and people reading books bound in the Western style, allowing me to feel that modernization was indeed progressing silently.
We were guided to the second floor of a fairly large and flashy restaurant, where four men who looked like Misang from Tokyo were sitting.
They introduced themselves one by one, and indeed, they were all Misang.
At this time, among Japanese merchants, except for the Jeongsang who were in league with the government like Mitsubishi or Mitsui, the Misang were the merchants with the largest capital scales.
They could have handled 8,000 Seok of rice individually, so it was a bit strange that four of them were gathered together.
The merchant who looked the oldest among them asked.
“You say you brought 8,000 Seok of rice; where on earth did you bring it from?”
Yuli Briner answered, and I interpreted in the middle.
“The fact that the rice exists is what’s important. Why does it matter where it was brought from?”
“That may be so, but we cannot help but be curious about the source. The rice produced in China is a different variety from the one we eat, Joseon is not open to Westerners, and even though Busan is open to Japan, rice doesn’t come out in such large quantities yet.”
Only then could I understand why four high-level Misang were sitting there for 8,000 Seok of rice.
They wanted to find out the source of the rice and pioneer a new supply route.
“I will only tell you that it was farmed elsewhere. The variety was grown from seeds taken from Japan, so you might as well call it Japanese rice.”
“Where in Japan were the seeds taken from?”
They tried their best to get even a little more information, but Yuli Briner was not an easy merchant to deal with either.
Like me, he already understood exactly why four big-shot Misang had come out to deal with him.
“Even if you ask, I cannot provide that information. If the secret of where and how we farmed is revealed, we might not be able to stay in business for long. Isn’t the important thing whether it is indeed rice and what the quality is?”
Yuli said as he handed them a few pouches containing the rice we had prepared.
“You’ll have to inspect all the rice we brought anyway, so the rice in the pouches wasn’t specially selected; it was just taken at random.”
The Misang opened the pouches Yuli handed over and examined the quality of the rice.
The representative Misang examined the rice and spoke.
“If all 8,000 Seok are of this quality, we will give you 4 Yen per Seok.”
“What are you talking about? It’s not like we’re handing it over as a standing crop; we’ve strictly processed and even transported it here to Yokohama. 4 Yen?”
Trading a standing crop referred to futures trading, a contract to hand over the entire volume that hadn’t been produced yet; there were even derivative products for this on the Tokyo Exchange.
“It is a strict fact that wholesale is cheaper than retail, is it not?”
“We also spent a lot of money reclaiming land and farming. We’d rather throw it into the sea than hand it over at that price. We’ve heard roughly what the trading price is at the Tokyo Exchange; do you think such a price makes sense? Shall we just head to Osaka like this?”
Tokyo is not the only place in Japan where large quantities of rice are traded.
It is traded on an even larger scale in Osaka, and the Tokyo Exchange itself was modeled after the Osaka Exchange.
“That doesn’t mean the Osaka Exchange will handle the rice you brought, sir!”
“Do you think you can keep ostracizing us like that when we bring this much volume every year—no, when the volume will continue to increase in the future? The reason Japan went to such lengths to force Joseon to open up was specifically because of rice. Does that mean you’ll buy Joseon’s rice but not ours? Shall we leave Tokyo and try selling elsewhere?”
When we showed that we were well-versed in the rice trading situation in Japan, the Misang whispered among themselves and shared their opinions, and Yuli Briner cut them off.
“If you promise to handle it at the Tokyo Exchange next time we bring rice, we will hand it over at 6 Yen per Seok. Don’t even think about cutting the price further. If you lower the price by even 1 Sen, we will simply withdraw.”
Since the price of rice in Tokyo at the time was fluctuating between 7 and 8 Yen at the exchange price, they would unconditionally make a profit as long as they purchased the rice from us.
They tried to maximize their profit by buying it as cheaply as possible since we were unknown Westerners, but Yuli Briner was not falling for it, and he seemed to know the rice trading situation in Tokyo well.
In the end, these people decided to purchase the rice at 6 Yen but said the promise to handle it at the Tokyo Exchange would be difficult.
“Letting you into the exchange is not something that happens as we please. We must get the consent of other merchants and permission from the government. However, if Mr. Briner continues to bring rice every year like this, the exchange will eventually accept it.”
Yuli Briner didn’t think it would be possible to enter the Tokyo merchants’ inner circle in one go, so he didn’t push that point any further.
We earned 64,000 Ruble from this transaction.
***