相場の神様
Honma
I'm translating the collected teachings of Munehisa Honma, an 18th-century Sakata rice trader, into English for the first time.
The trader
Munehisa Honma (本間宗久) was born in 1717 into a merchant family in Sakata, on the Japan Sea coast, and traded rice at the Sakata and Osaka Dōjima exchanges. He traded with enough success that later generations called him 相場の神様 — the god of the markets. He died in 1803.
His name reaches modern English-language finance mostly through secondhand summary. The primary texts themselves have stayed in Edo-period Japanese, unread.
The texts
The tradition rests on two texts. The first, Sōkyū-ō Sōba Zenshū (宗久翁相場全集), is a 1910 Shingidō collation of Honma's teachings: 158 articles across two volumes, scanned by the National Diet Library and in the public domain.
The second, Sanen Kinsen Hiroku (三猿金泉秘録), dates to about 1755. English-language literature has attributed it to Honma since Steve Nison's Beyond Candlesticks (1994), but the manuscript names its own author: Ushida Gonzaburō (牛田権三郎), a trader at the Osaka Dōjima exchange. I follow what the primary source says.
Before this project, no complete English translation of any text in this tradition had been published. It is also worth stating plainly what the sources do not contain: neither text mentions a candlestick. Japanese technical-analysis scholarship dates the candle chart to the Meiji 30s (1897–1906), roughly a century after Honma died.
The method
The manuscripts are written in kuzushiji, the cursive script of the period. I kept transcription and translation as two deliberately separate stages: first transcribing with the National Diet Library's kuzushiji OCR, then translating from that transcription. Keeping the stages apart means an illegible character surfaces as an explicit flag rather than being quietly smoothed over in a single pass.
A professional Japanese-to-English translator blind-checked the 17 hardest passages — about 2,500 source characters — and found five meaning-level errors, which were corrected. The full audit trail is public: scans, OCR transcriptions with per-character confidence, translation drafts, and LaTeX sources.
One chapter is titled "This Book Must Not Be Shown to Others." The body of that chapter is missing from the only surviving scan.
The book
The translation is being published as The Wisdom of Munehisa Honma — Market aphorisms from the legendary rice trader of Edo-period Japan, translated and edited by Zach Booth. This is a preprint edition; a print edition is forthcoming.
Talks
- Friday, July 31, 2026 TSAA-SF Annual Conference — Golden Gate University, San Francisco, and Zoom.
- September 2026 JADH 2026 — Japanese Association for Digital Humanities annual conference, Kyushu, Japan. Paper: "From Hiroku to Open Data: How Edo-Period Secret Market Texts Migrate Across Digital Umwelts."