Osaka wrote the first futures contract in 1730, and the underlying was rice. Kome Reserves puts that instrument back on a ledger: one token is one hyō — 60 kg of Special-A grade rice sitting in a bonded warehouse, in a named prefecture, under a lot number you can call and verify.
Every vault sits in a district that scored Special A — the top band of the national taste ranking — in 2023, 2024 and 2025 without a single miss. Nothing below that grade is admitted to the reserve. Select a node to read its lot.
The three bars per row are the grade held in 2023 · 2024 · 2025. Every row is three bars — that is the admission rule, not a coincidence. Totals below are computed from these rows, never typed in.
| Prefecture | District | Variety | Grade 23·24·25 | Lots | Hyō 俵 | Tonnes | Koku 石 | Basis ¥ |
|---|
A token that represents "some rice" is a promise. A token that represents one hyō in lot NG-0004 is a receipt. Kome Reserves only issues the second kind.
Grade bands, in descending order: 特A · A · A′ · B · B′. Kome Reserves admits the first band only.
A grower delivers a milled, inspected lot into a bonded prefectural warehouse. The inspection certificate carries the variety, crop year, protein band and grade. No certificate, no deposit.
The warehouse receipt is registered and KOME mints exactly
one token per hyō held — lot → token, never the reverse.
Supply cannot exceed the tonnage on the receipts.
Tokens move without the rice moving — precisely what the kome kitte rice bill did on the Dōjima floor, three centuries before the word "settlement layer" existed.
Burn tokens against a lot and the warehouse releases physical rice at 60 kg per token. Redemption retires supply permanently, so the ledger and the shelf stay equal.
In February 2025 the government opened its emergency rice reserve for the first time in the programme's history. Verifiable warehouse title stopped being an academic idea that month.
The state stores roughly a million tonnes across about 300 climate-controlled sites, rotated on a five-year cycle. Storage ran about ¥14.2 bn in FY2023, with depreciation over ¥30 bn — carrying physical rice is expensive, which is exactly why title to it should be liquid.
Kome Reserves is not competing with that. Against the reserve's depleted May-2026 level, this vault set is deliberately small — and we would rather print the fraction than imply otherwise.
Feudal domains warehoused tax rice in Osaka, sold it by auction, and issued rice bills — notes redeemable for a specific stored lot. Those bills traded. That is the whole idea, and it is 296 years old.
The rice price formed at Dōjima was disseminated by couriers or flag signals across hundreds of kilometres, reaching the capital and other major cities.
In 1730 the Tokugawa shogunate authorised both a spot market in rice bills and a futures market in named rice brands, with a membership system and a clearing function. It is widely recognised as the world's first organised futures exchange — and the underlying was a warehouse receipt for grain.
Kome Reserves is not a novel financial instrument. It is the kome kitte with a public settlement layer and a grade floor: the warehouse still holds the rice, the receipt still moves faster than the cargo, and the price still travels faster than both.