元祿改鋳의 목적에 대한 재고

Reconsideration of the Purpose of Genroku Reminting(元祿改鑄)

The Sanka System(the trio money standard system) in the Edo period had a core function in the social and economic aspects of national systems for the maintenance of the Shogunate System. However, the Sanka System went through the first major transformation through the Genroku Reminting carried out in the end of the 17th century. In the first half of this paper the progress and results of the Genroku Reminting is reviewed around the essential historical sources. The second half deals with the purpose of the Genroku Reminting by comparing the Shogunate s financial situation, trends in recent years in academia and the Ogihara Shigehide(荻原重秀), the implementer of remint policy’s view of monetary and that of Arai Hakuseki(新井白石), the denunciator against Ogihara Shigehide. Many modern historians have evaluated the Genroku Reminting from a negative perspective considering that it ignored the suffering of the people caused by the high-prices policy that focused on Shogunate’s financial profit. In response to this view, Oishi Shinzaburo(大石慎三郎), the post-war historian of the early modern Japanese history argued that expanding the money supply by the Genroku Reminting was actually appropriate for the development of the contemporary city market economy, while Arai Hakuseki’s monetary policy obsessed with high grade of gold/silver coins was anachronistic. Then Oishi’s opinion has been widely accepted among quantity economic historians and it has now become common view. In this paper, I pointed out there is a significant weakness in this common view that premises that the Edo Shogunate in the end of 17th century already had macroeconomic(or modern) policy capacity by without clearly discerning between the overcoming of financial crisis as the original purpose of Genroku Reminting and its positive function on the market economy as its result. In addition, it is necessary to recognize clearly that Arai Hakuseki’s view of monetary that connected the dignity of metallic money with the stability of the internal regime and external enhancement of national prestige reflects both the perspective and the limits of the ruling power of Edos’ former period in which politics was considered superior to economy.