A Map of Ōmiya City Should Do the Trick?

[Core Room]

"Since large-scale farming and a collective farm both look impossible, we'll borrow the conventional farming-village system of this vicinity."

"An unfamiliar way of doing things would cause an uprising, right."

"This region isn't Worker-Peasant Russia, after all. Russians have an exogamous communal-family structure, so they're suited to collective farms, I suppose. To start with, the villages around here are, as in the Edo period, on the order of fifty to eighty households, with a population of roughly two to four hundred. This village becomes the unit for paying the annual tax. Considering management, too, that's about the proper size."

"So the village is the basic unit."

"Yes. I also considered a compulsory-education system, but for one thing there are no teachers, and rushing it could well spark an uprising against the school ordinance. Either way, the monks needed for the temple-registration system, and the masterless samurai who'll likely come gathering here, can serve as teachers, with the dungeon subsidizing the cost. Then, once the situation settles, we follow the Meiji-era town-and-village system and set up one elementary school per three to five hundred households. By the reckoning, that's about one school for every five villages or so. In the Meiji era, administrative villages were established under the town-and-village system, but since calling them 'villages' would be confusing, I'll think of what to call them later."

"And eventually reading and writing for everyone?"

"I'm not so unreasonable as to demand a hundred-percent literacy rate. This dungeon has a high energy-conversion efficiency for emotions relating to knowledge, so a high literacy rate is desirable, but the constraints of intelligence and the problem of functional illiteracy will always cling to us, so realistically let's settle for seventy or eighty percent."

"And so the layout of the villages is decided by the area of farmland per farming household."

"That's how it works. The fields and waterways are all dungeon structures, so we can manage larger farms than in the Edo period. But planting and harvesting rice require human hands, so we have to keep it within a range the whole village can work through. That comes to about two or three chōbu per household. In that case, the villages are spaced a bit under half a ri apart, with around two hundred chōbu of fields each, and the elementary schools spaced about one ri apart, perhaps."

"And you place them at even intervals."

"No. Ignoring the existing terrain to level the land wastes far too much dungeon energy, so we'll work with the terrain."

Marie went on inscribing the villages' planned positions onto the map.

"At each gate of the dungeon, we'll place a town that doubles as a post-station and a market. We'll just give these the same names as the gates: Kamikochō to the west, Ōnaruchō to the northwest, Domachi to the northeast, Yoshikichō to the southeast, and nothing to the southwest for now. That should do."

"I can't keep them all straight."

"The farmland out to the Shibakawa in the east and the Kamogawa in the west will be allotted to these towns. If I were to force it onto a town-and-village-system map, the image would be Ōmiya Town, the eastern two-thirds of Namiki Village, the southern part of Nisshin Village, and the northern tip of Yono Town."

"Since the terrain doesn't match, it's a 'force it on' situation."

"That can't be helped. Now, in the case of the westward direction we're developing first, west of the Kamogawa, on the map, runs the rest of Namiki Village, then Sashiōgi Village, Umamiya Village, Furuya Village, and so on. Well, there are issues, such as Namiki Village soon being renamed Mitsuhashi Village, Umamiya being a synthetic place-name with no real provenance, and Furuya not being in Adachi County."

"And you'll name them off roughly."

"Just so. Without overthinking it. Only, these villages are Meiji administrative villages, not Edo-period villages. In the Edo period there were many farmers with cramped holdings, three-tan farmers, five-tan farmers and the like, but in this dungeon we hand out the fields on the wider side, so the villages come out larger."

"So we name them by positional relationship alone, without regard to distance."

"That's one way. Only then we'd lose consistency with the eastward direction and with the dry valley we've already named. Also, with the place-names changed, there are spots where the Edo-period village names can't be neatly picked up. For example, west of the Kamogawa is Shimo-Uchino Village, but on the present-day map its extent is hard to make out."

"Seeing as this is a library dungeon, why not summon Ōmiya's local-history records in the library and look it up?"

"This world itself isn't exactly a perfect replica of Edo-period Saitama, so there's no need to be that rigorous about it. There's a fair amount of Meiji-era Japanese-made kanji compounds in use that shouldn't have existed in the Edo period, after all."

"I wonder if there's an otherworld reincarnator about."

"The Encyclopedia Dungeonica has an entry on academy summoning, so whether by reincarnation or replication summoning, such cases probably did occur. True enough, you don't find anything from the twentieth or twenty-first century in their technology, but with no industrial base, bringing advanced technology over from another world is exceedingly difficult. Even this library-city dungeon, who knows what would've become of it without Mint, the super-peppermint."

Reincarnation leaves a corpse, because the original person dies and is reborn. Replication summoning leaves the original person as they are and summons a copy. But there's also summoning a body and all from the original world, and the corpse-possession summoning that uses a sacrifice may involve a dead person, so it isn't all that strictly defined.

"It's all rather difficult. Why not just leave the village names to the settlers."

"That's the easiest, but it has its drawbacks. The bad example is America. New This-and-That, names lifted from the Bible, several towns with the same name. Hokkaido has place-names like that, too, but many derive from the Ainu language, so they don't stand out as much."

"Let's see, this area was Adachi, wasn't it. Not the Kita-Adachi County of the otherworld, but the Adachi of this world, are there really no fine-grained place-names here either?"

"Who knows. It was an uninhabited zone, after all. Still, I wonder, was this vicinity uninhabited since before recorded history?"

"There were ruins off to the east. I wonder if there was once an Adachi magistracy or the like."

"Who can say. Unfortunately, we can't very well look it up in the library, can we."