MONAS | Tone 1 | Phrase 6: The Call of the Donketsu Stones

Aureilia
Jun 12
14 min read

Updated: Jul 8

‘Star-Crossed Souls’ [Tone 1. Shiga: The Sea of Niho] 〜 This muddy vesture of decay 〜

The violent downpour from moments ago had entirely cleared, and the early summer sunlight was just beginning to pierce through the breaks in the clouds.

“...Right. Magnificent white walls... but this wainscoting. It’s not your standard charred cedar. These are boat planks...!”

“Kai-san, look! There are absolutely masses of carp swimming about...!”

“...What?”

“...Pardon?”

Having just stepped out of the car, the two of them froze dead in their tracks the very moment they set foot in the elegant, historic streets of Gokashō, staring fixedly at the waterway.

To any passing onlooker, they appeared to be nothing more than utterly suspicious characters.

Gokashō—the ancestral cradle of the Ōmi merchants, where crystalline spring waters from the Suzuka Mountains wind through the veins of the town. Historically situated along the Nakasendō highway, a vital transportation artery connecting Hokuriku, Tōkai, and Kyoto, this settlement flourished around local merchants. By the mid-Edo period, they had amassed astronomical wealth through a bidirectional trading strategy known as the ‘Nokogiri’ (saw-tooth) method—a relentless saw-like rotation of regional goods that generated immense profit margins. This wealth was immediately reinvested back into the community, funding local infrastructure and cultivating the next generation of elite talent.

On the outward journey, they carried Ōmi’s prized speciality, ‘Takamiya-Nuno’ (exquisite hemp textiles), along with cotton cloth and mosquito nets, balanced on carrying poles to branch stores established in distant provinces. On the return journey, they procured Hokkaido marine products or Kyushu sugar at low costs, selling them in the capital to generate double profits. This ingenious logistics strategy effectively reduced practical transportation costs to near zero. Furthermore, through an information network woven across the nation like a spider’s web, real-time market data—a pre-modern precursor to ‘big data’—detailing where to buy cheaply and what to sell at premium prices was instantly shared between the main house and its branch apprentices.

Moreover, the sons of Gokashō were sent out to apprentice at other merchant houses or branches from a tender age, where they were rigorously trained in practical business and the absolute mathematical precision of the soroban (abacus). Highly capable apprentices were eventually granted noren-wake—the prestigious system of brand-sharing backed by startup capital—triggering a continuous wave of innovative startups from this single, small town.

Indeed, the founders and prominent shareholders of household names such as Wacoal, Choya Umeshu, and Nippon Life Insurance are famously rooted in Gokashō.

Following the Meiji Restoration, the town was among the first to adopt foreign language education, steering its business operations toward a global horizon. The merchants of Gokashō, and the broader Ōmi region, silently laid the very foundations of modern Japan.