When Japanese peasants were taxed in imaginary silver

A closer look

Paying taxes is painful enough, but sixteenth-century Japanese warlords decided to tax their peasants using silver coins that literally did not exist. Because actual silver was chaotic and hard to standardize, the government invented 'kandaka', a purely hypothetical unit of account. Farmers had to evaluate their rice yields in this phantom ghost-money, then pay the equivalent value in whatever actual copper or crops they had. It was a bureaucratic nightmare that forced peasants to play foreign exchange trader just to survive.