Important note here. Rokugan culture is skewed compared to our understanding because Rokugan *reality* is skewed compared to our understanding. Rokugani of the samurai caste are descended from gods, and there are no limits on the heights of ability that they can reach. Rokugan breeds god-killers, which is good, because it gets attacked by divinity-level threats on a not infrequent basis. For most cultures, starvation must be avoided at all costs. It's an existential threat. For Rokugan, they have that (to a lesser extent because Thank You, Blessed Inari), but they also must keep their walking god-killers both reasonably happy and regularly fighting because that's how you get the kind of heroes that you need to do things like hunt down and deal with (preferably kill) Fu Leng/The Moon/The Nothing/The Shadow Dragon/The Dark Oracles/Kali/The Dark Naga/Fudo/P'an Ku on a Bad Day/etc. Hand-crafted gear is a thing because they need hypercompetent craftsmen to make the absurdly good weapons and armor for their hypercompetent warriors to wear.
So, weird as it may seem, the over-aggressive cut-you-down-where-you-stand mentality is actually pretty important to long-term Rokugani survival (and the rest of the world, too, given that Rokugan seems to be the thing that all of the world's existential threats get drawn to). Having commerce mostly work would be great, but keeping the murderblenders buying in is more important, and is going to keep being more important in ways that it just didn't in our world. We have to basically sneak any reforms through in ways that won't let the merchants get too much of an edge... because if the merchants get too much of an edge over the samurai caste... yeah. Things get *ugly*.
Why does life suck for the merchants? Because the despite of samurai is safer than their envy. We basically need to find ways to make it suck *less* without making that envy grow too much. I do like the idea of the split monetary standard, though. Throw in a few laws to make sure that koku is a privileged monetary standard in some ways, so that when it turns into the monetary standard of samurai and farmers, there's the feeling that it's because samurai and farmers are the important and privileged ones, and we can make sure that the samurai continue to have people accept (and value) the coin they have available to spend. Either that or we somehow build mega-granaries so that we can stabilize the price of rice from year to year.
Still torn on which way to go. That point about "early in the reign" is an interesting one, though. Also, on re-read... the downside to ignoring the monks is that we're likely to start seeing a Brotherhood Civil War in a bit. In the balance of things? We can *afford* one of those. Monks killing monks don't produce but so much collateral damage. We need the money to do the War Machine actions, and we need the War Machine actions because the Glass Golems are coming.
...and beyond the limit on years, there's the fact that the brotherhood action pisses off Unicorn and Lion, and the Merchant action pisses off Lion and Crab. Trying to drop 10 points of Lion favor in the next two years on top of everything else... not necessarily the best idea. We can pick up the pieces on the Brotherhood once the brunt of the war is past... and if they've beaten each other down enough at that point, and we're coming off a successful war, we may have extra influence there.
[x] While the idea of moving off the rice standard is complete insanity. The notion of these 'charters' has some merit. It's really just taxing people for providing things for merchants. You think you can sell it, although...yeah, you're going to take a hit on this (TN 30, 16% Chance. +10 to Mantis, +5 to Unicorn. -5 to Lion, Crane, Crab)
[x] Go talk to one of your advisors
-[x] Horiuchi Shem-Zhe
Thanks to
@whydoyoubother for your compelling arguments.
