The Dojima Rice Exchange: Japanese Merchants Monopolization of Industrial Agriculture

[Jiang Jin]

In 1697, Japanese merchants who owned the factory farms, that used water and wind powered hulling mills to produce rice on an industrial scale, created the futures contract, which is a standardized legal agreement to buy or sell something at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future, between parties not known to each other, by establishing the Dojima Rice Exchange. Eventually, the merchants who owned these large farming cartels grew so powerful that they monopolized the rice industry in Japan just like the great American Polymaths Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Colt, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, David Sarnoff, Philo Farnsworth, Howard Hughes, George Devol, Homer Hickam, Smokey Yunnick, Nolan Bushnell, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Lowell Wood, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, who monopolized various sectors of the world economy to become the most powerful men on the planet. Additionally, the agricultural and aquaculture complexes of these merchants grew so large that they built massive warehouses and markets all over Osaka and later the rest of Japan. The Japanese merchants also used the following machines to mass produce food products on an industrial scale:


Noodle Extruder - used for mass producing noodles.

Smokehouse - used for mass producing smoked food that does not easily spoil.

Hulling Mill - used for hulling rice.

Gristmill - used for grinding grains into flour.

Hand Hulling Mill - a portable device for hulling rice.

Hand Gristmill - a portable device for grinding grains.

Edge Mill - uses a rolling stone revolving around a central power shaft to grind various materials. It is especially useful for mass producing oil from plant and animal parts.

Oil Mill - uses an edge mill to mass produce oil, including cooking oil.


Below is a video of a Noodle Extruder in action:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde..._Peng_Zhou.ogv


Below is an image of the Dojima Rice Market:




Below is an image of the Temma Vegetable Market:




Below is an image of the Zakoba Fish Market:




Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Djima_Rice_Exchange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_contract
https://web.archive.org/web/20121014..._in_osaka.html