Use First, Pay Later

Leave the medicine chest first, and collect later for whatever was used. The medicine sellers of Toyama completed a model of the continuing relationship in the Edo period, right down to the customer ledger — the kakecho — and a culture of small gifts. The founding anecdote of 1690, in which the lord Maeda Masatoshi cured a stomach ache at Edo Castle with hangontan and the assembled lords asked to take some home, is a tradition without documentary support. Whether the phrase «use first, profit later» was even contemporary cannot be confirmed. What happened with «the three-way good» — a slogan coined in 1988 — may well have happened here too. This map writes both the elegance of the mechanism and the fragility of the story. And note the shape of it: this is far closer to pay-per-use than to a flat monthly subscription. Two red lines have been drawn from here into the future.