"Hachiman Great Bodhisattva! Uncle, you mean a wealthy merchant's gold would not be spent lightly? It's a guarantee of credit, used to carry out trade worth ten times the value of the gold?"
"Exactly! You can understand it that way!... In Kyoto's trade, there are expensive goods from every region: arms and tea utensils from Sakai Port, ceramics and seafood from Hakata, washi paper and blades from Echizen, hemp cloth and tea from Omi, Kyo ware and silk from Mountain City, warhorses from Owari and Akita, lacquerware from Kaga and Noto, even silk and porcelain from the Ming Dynasty... The more valuable the goods, the harder it is to trade by barter! Sometimes settlement takes long years, counted in years..."
"At times like that, there must be sufficient gold currency to serve as a guarantee for the circulation of trade among wealthy merchants from every region. And an intermediary who can provide ample currency will naturally be welcomed by the merchant groups everywhere and get a share of the pie!..."
"In truth, whether gold, silver, or copper coins, every kind of currency is a display of a great merchant's credit and strength! But gold is the most precious... Likewise, when the merchant groups of each region choose whom to trade with, they will only choose wealthy merchants with deep pockets and ample currency, not small merchants who cannot produce money and can only barter. Because that makes the risk of trade lowest, the least likely to go wrong; even reducing profit by ten or twenty percent is acceptable. And once a stable, reliable trading partner is settled on, it often continues for a whole generation without change!..."
The great merchant Morino Kiyoshi smiled faintly as he explained the ways wealthy merchants dealt with one another. For the Wajin of this