USA
Copyright© 2016 by Old Man with a Pen
Chapter 47
One Koku of rice would feed one man for a year ... or about 330 pounds of rice. Four Koku, 1320 pounds of rice, was the value of a single gold ryō coin. One ryō weighed 15 grams. One ryō was worth about four hundred thousand yen, depending on the rice harvest. The official exchange rate in 1931... 109.01. Four hundred thousand yen was worth 3668.00 dollars. I had a large bag of ryō coins ... each worth ... oh Lordy! A fortune!
I hefted the bag ... good lord!
I wondered what the two swords and stand were worth.
I hired Hideo to find me an armed escort back to the boat. Two messengers and there were 40 armed men arrayed out front waiting.
"How much?"
"One time deal?"
"One time deal."
"One ryō."
"For everybody?"
"One ryō for everybody," Hideo said. He handed me a small flag. "My Zaibatsu chop," he said. "Nobody will bother you."
"Then why the men?"
"In case somebody decides to commit seppuku," Hideo said laughing.
And then he went with us.
No trouble.
The men were stevedores. They unloaded what had to be the most expensive six thousand pounds of rice in the world.
The next day, Hideo and his father came to see us off.
Chinese silk might have been first ... but Indochina produces the best. Siam was in the middle of the world wide depression when Phrabat Somdet Phra Poraminthramaha Prajadhipok Phra Pokklao Chao Yuhua suddenly became King Rama VII.
We sailed into the head of the Gulf of Siam and up the Chao Phraya River to the merchant docks of Bangkok ... Our bag of Japanese gold was speedily turned into Siamese silk cloth ... a hold full of bolts and bolts of fine silk.
Bangkok stinks ... the river is filthy, full of human and animal waste and the odd victim of circumstances. We didn't stay a minute longer than necessary.
Now, we had something worth stealing. Millions of dollars worth of silk. News of our coming preceded us and there was always some fool who wanted what we had. By the time we reached Singapore we had expended seventy-five percent of our ammunition stocks.