Japanese films - Abacus and Sword

Abacus and Sword

武士の家計簿
Bushi no Kakeibo

Household Book of a Samurai

The story of a family

The film is based on the novel "Household Book of a Samurai", published in 2003 by Michio Kashiwada (*1970), a professor of Japanese cultural studies. Using the preserved accounting records of a samurai family, their history from the years 1840 to 1920 is reconstructed and told.
This family has been employed in the accounting department of the court in the Kaga Han (Kaga fief) in Kanazawa for generations. Kanazawa lies at the foot of the Noto Peninsula, which was last hit by a severe earthquake in 2024.
The art that has been continuously passed down in the family is not the art of swordsmanship but the mastery of the soroban (Japanese abacus).

Movie Data

International Title: Abacus and Sword
Original title: 武士の家計簿 Bushi no Kakeibo - Household Book of a Samurai
Published: 2010
Length: 129 minutes

Staff
Director: Yoshimitsu Morita
Script: Michio Kashiwada; Michifumi Isoda (Roman)
Music: Michiru Oshima

Cast
Masako Sakai: Naoyuki Inoyama
Yukie Nakama: Koma Inoyama
Keiko Matsuzaka: Tsune Inoyama
Mashiko Nishimura: Yosanpachi Nishimura
Mitsuko Kusabue: Grand-grand-mother
Yuki Katsuragi: Haru Inoyama
Yuki Ito: Inoyama
Mina Fuji: Masa Inoyama
Kaito Oyagi: Naokichi Inoyama as child
Masatoshi Nakamura: Nobuyuki Inoyama

Plot

The film begins in Meiji 10 (1877). The first-person narrator Naokichi Inoyama is the general paymaster of the navy in Tokyo. In his office he receives a letter from his father in Kanazawa with the family accounts for the past month to check for any errors.
The film then flashes back and tells of Naokichi's grandfather, how his father gets married and Naokichi is born. At the end of the Tenpō era (1831-1845) there was a famine in Japan. The father Naoyuki uncovers fraud with rice for the starving population and is therefore promoted. Naokichi is trained on the soroban from a young age, which he hates and which erupts in an outburst of anger.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, the family becomes impoverished. The father's solution is to sell everything unnecessary from the household and keep an accurate household account in the future. Here too, it is not entirely clear in the film how the austerity measures are controlled and enforced beyond pure accounting.
Naokichi grows up and for his Hakama celebration his mother paints pictures of sea bream on paper as a substitute for the real fish that the family cannot afford for the banquet with all relatives.
Naokichi marries and has barely had children of his own when he has to go to war for the Bakufu against Chōshū in 1866. The "black ships" of the American Commodore Perry forced Japan to open its borders in 1853. Now there are military conflicts between the Bakufu (Tokugawa Shogunate) and domains loyal to the emperor who want to reinstate the Tennō as ruler. After the chaos of the war, Naokichi became Paymaster General of the Navy and later Finance Minister in the Meiji government because of his skills with the Soroban and his organizational skills.
The film is not very spectacular, but it does provide interesting insights into the culture and way of life at the end of the Edo period.

Soroban

The Soroban (算盤 counting board) is the Japanese abacus that is operated with one hand while lying on the table. It is more flexible, but also more difficult to operate than the school abacus commonly used in Europe. In the upper part there are two balls with the value 5, in the lower part there are four or five, each with the value 1. The Soroban goes back to the Chinese Suànpán.
The Soroban became widespread in Japan in the 16th century. It remained an indispensable calculating tool for school and work until the 19th century. It was only the school reforms at the beginning of the Meiji period that were able to briefly displace it. It experienced a renaissance in the 1920s. It only lost importance again due to affordable electronic calculators. However, it is still widely used in Japan today.
There is a ranking system for Soroban users that goes up to 10th Dan.

Units of measurement

Various Japanese units of measurement appear in the film, for lengths, areas, volumes and for money. A systematic overview can be found in Wikipedia. The koku 石, often used in samurai films, was a standard volume of rice of about 180 liters. It was said that it would feed a person for a year. Traditionally, one koku of rice was equivalent to one ryo 両 of money, which was represented by a gold coin called a koban 小判 (actual prices varied considerably depending on the harvest). A koban had a fixed weight of 18.2 grams or 0.64 ounces of gold. One ryo was equivalent to 4,000 mon 文 (round copper coin with a small square hole). Most Japanese currency units also served as units of weight. This was also common in Europe, for example with the British pound (350 grams of sterling silver), the German mark (234 g of fine silver) and the French livre (453 g of fine silver).
The 4 mon coin found by Naokichi in the film would be worth a few euro cents today (depending on the conversion concept). His father's income of 70 koku was nominally enough to feed 70 people, i.e. the entire family including all servants, and also finance necessary purchases of goods.

Bakumatsu

Bakumatsu (幕末) means “end of the Bakufu”, the last period of the Tokugawa or Edo period. This period extends from the arrival of Matthew Perry's "black ships" in 1853 and his gunboat policy to the return of power from the shogun to the emperor in 1867.
It was a time of internal unrest, marked by increasing dissatisfaction among the samurai with the policies of the shogunate, changing alliances in the struggle for power, accompanied by a wave of nationalism on the one hand and interest in Western modernity on the other.
The trigger for the collapse of the bakufu was the forced opening of the country and the so-called unequal treaties with the USA in 1854 and other Western powers from 1858 to 1860. With the argument that the bakufu had not sufficiently consulted the emperor when signing the treaties, it was attacked by its political opponents under the slogan "sonnō jōi 尊皇攘夷" (Honor the emperor - drive out the barbarians!). In the early 1860s in particular, numerous foreigners were murdered.
The bakufu reacted with harsh countermeasures. But it increasingly found itself on the defensive. The renegade domains - especially Chōshū and Satsuma - resisted the bakufu's orders and built up modern armies with the help of their former enemies England and France. These were superior to the bakufu's troops, as the failed punitive expedition against Chōshū in 1866 showed. In 1867, the shogun finally returned power to the emperor. With Emperor Mutsuhito under government motto Meiji, Japan entered a new era. Only a few loyal followers of the bakufu tried to resist again in the Boshin War, but were defeated after a short time.
The reasons for the collapse of the bakufu are, according to the prevailing opinion, more complex than the arrival of the militarily superior Western powers and lie to a large extent in the social and economic problems of the Edo period.

Brocade Banner

In the film, the "invincible Nishiki-No-Mihata (錦の御旗, the banner of golden brocade)" is raised by the Chōshū troops on the battlefield. Some samurai clans in southern Japan had decided to overthrow the Shogun, who they believed had sold himself out to the Americans by allowing Commodore Perry to pressure Japan at gunpoint to end over 200 years of national isolation and sign a humiliating trade treaty.
Just as no king in Europe could afford to send troops against the Pope, no Japanese would dare take up arms against the Emperor, since being labeled an "enemy of the Imperial Court" was comparable to being excommunicated as an "enemy of the Church" in the West. Therefore, when this banner was raised, many soldiers in the Shogun's army immediately dropped their weapons.

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