Pooling Money, Taking Turns
The oldest recorded kō in Japan was raising money to repair a bathhouse. It appears as «tanomoshi» in a Koyasan document of the twelfth month of 1275. The mechanism is simple: a dozen or so people meet, each puts in a fixed sum, and one member — chosen by lot or by bidding — takes the whole pot that round. When everyone has had a turn, the group dissolves. A company with an expiry date. In eastern Japan it was called mujin, in the west tanomoshi, and in Okinawa moai. The familiar etymology — «relying on one another as mother and child» — looks like a meaning read back into what was originally just a phonetic spelling; the sources disagree. What is striking is that the shogunate and the domains banned it again and again, for two reasons: the gambling element in who wins the pot, and the fear that people meeting regularly was itself the seedbed of an uprising. The lotteries running alongside it followed the same road — banned in 1692, licensed for temples and shrines in the Kyōhō era, then prohibited outright in 1842. And the kō is still alive. In Okinawa more than half the population is said to take part in moai, including pots of a million yen and company moai; in Yamanashi «mujin» survives as the name for a night out. On a map covering four thousand years of commerce, this is the one model from the Kamakura period still in active service.
The myth, corrected
The mujin and the tanomoshi-kō are a uniquely Japanese form of mutual aid
The very same arrangement grew up independently all over the world: the chit fund in India, the gye in Korea, susu in West Africa, the tontine in France, the arisan in Indonesia. In 1962 the anthropologist Clifford Geertz compared China, Japan and Vietnam in «The Rotating Credit Association: A “Middle Rung” in Development» and set them out as a single type — the ROSCA, the rotating savings and credit association. Where there are no banks and people need to raise money together, humanity tends to arrive at the same shape. After «sanpō yoshi», «use first, pay later» and «loyalty points were invented in Japan», this is the fourth time this map has caught a “uniquely Japanese” claim.