HOW MUCH DID IT COST?

1877 prices are from Things Japanese by Basil Hall Chamberlain. They are prices a Tokyo lady (who seems to have had more money than Kaoru) was paying for common household items in 1877.

The measures given are Chamberlain's. Obviously goods sold wouldn't have been in English measure like quarts or pounds, but those are the measures he gave. If quantities are unclear, it's because my source didn't give them. I have no idea how big a bundle of firewood, or how much soy was in a barrel, or whether eggs came singly or in a conventional quantity like the English/American dozen. Married women typically wore their hair in elaborate styles and didn't have their hair dressed every day. Note the difference in price (and presumably quality) between the lady's geta and those of her kitchen maid.

Then I turned up a book called Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai. Katsu Kokichi is hardly a picture of samurai rectitude; he was a schemer, an operator, something of a wastrel – but his memoir is a marvelously-detailed account of life in 19th century Edo. An appendix gives prices for some more common items – of course the coinages differ, and so do their values.

Coin values:

And now for the prices of common household items. Again note the difference in the coinages; quantities may differ also.

MONEY LINKS

The Bank of Japan's Currency Museum

Building a National Currency: Japan 1868-1899: an article from the American Numismatic Association on the transition from Tokugawa to Meiji as reflected in the currency.