Economics appears to be a somewhat poorly explored side of the Narutoverse. Aside from a few small and trivial details, the series never places much focus on it. Still, I decided to look at the canon material and see if I could find anything interesting. What I found was a problem that shows that the Narutoverse really makes very little sense when it comes to very basic economic matters—which might have been somewhat obvious given that it’s a shounen series.
N.B. Since there isn’t as much detail about all the villages as there is about Konoha, this post will be pretty Konoha-centric.
What we know
+The currency used in the Narutoverse is called the ryo. 1 ryo is equal to 10 Japanese yen. 1 yen is equal to 0.01 USD (a penny), so 1 ryo is equal to a dime. The fact that the ryo can be converted to the Japanese yen is very important because it means that the ryo can then be converted to any other fiat currency in the real world. In this case, I’ll be primarily focusing on the U.S. Dollar.
+The second fanbook gives a simplistic “x/5” rating to the economic strength of each great village. Interestingly, four of the five villages (Konohagakure, Sunagakure, Iwagakure, and Kirigakure) have a rating of 2/5. Kumogakure is the only great village that has more than that, as it stays completely unrivaled with an economic strength of 5/5.
+Just like economic strength, population is also given a simplistic “x/5” rating. From biggest to smallest: Konohagukure (5/5), Iwagakure (4/5), Kumogakure (3/5), Kirigakure (2/5), and Sunagakure (2/5).
D-rank missions pay between 5,000 to 50,000 ryo (i.e. between approximately 500 to 5,000 USD).
C-rank missions pay between 30,000 to 100,000 ryo (i.e. between approximately 3,000 to 10,000 USD).
B-rank missions pay between 80,000 to 200,000 ryo (i.e. between approximately 8,000 to 20,000 USD).
A-rank missions pay between 150,000 to 1,000,000 ryo (i.e. between approximately 15,000 to 100,000 USD). Quite a big jump compared to the other ranks, as you probably noticed.
S-rank missions pay 1,000,000 ryo and beyond (i.e. at least 100,000 USD).
+Each year in Konohagakure, out of all the children who go to the Ninja Academy, only 9 become genin. Genins go on D-rank and C-missions.
+There are ways to acquire money besides missions, such as teaching, writing, prostitution, etc.
What we don’t know
+We are never given an exact number for the economies of any of the villages.
+We are never given an exact number for the populations of any of the villages.
+We don’t know how many business days they have in a year.
The problem
From now on, I’ll only use dollars in order to better visualize this problem—but remember, the point still stands whether I use dollars or yen or ryo because we are given an actual exchange rate for the ryo.
Since genins (read: normal genins, not Naruto and Sasuke) only go on D-rank and C-rank missions, we can try and come up with the least gross annual income for a genin—that is, the smallest amount of money that the laziest genin procrastinator can make. Assuming that weekends work the same way in the Narutoverse, this gives us 261 business days in a year. Take away 11 days for holidays (I know I’m taking this straight out of my ass, but bear with me) and we’re left with 250 business days. Now, let’s suppose that a genin does nothing but the easiest D-rank missions and only does 1 D-rank mission in a day (although we’ve actually seen characters do multiple D-rank missions in a day, but let’s just go with the absolute minimum), and we’ll get the following number for their annual income: 125,000 dollars! That’s right, a genin can make 125,000 dollars a year and live off of nothing but D-rank missions where all he does is find pets and mow gardens. If you throw in a few more higher-paying D-rank missions and a few C-rank missions in there, the annual income can go well above 150,000 dollars. Now, you might say “but only 9 people become genin each year, so they’re just the rich 0.1%,” but you’d be wrong, because here is when things become truly absurd: every D-rank mission that any genin ever does can actually be finished by any able-bodied person, even if they aren’t ninjas. Manual labor? Finding pets? Weeding gardens? Every one of these pays a minimum of 500 dollars, and can be done by anyone. This leads me to 4 possibly logical conclusions, which, ordered from the least logical to the most logical, are:
a. People who aren’t genin (or aren’t even ninjas for that matter) are allowed to do D-rank missions, which would then mean that everyone in Konoha has at least an annual income of 125,000 dollars, which makes no sense whatsoever.
b. The law restricts people who aren’t ninjas to do any physical work. Because, if you think about it, what can be simpler than finding lost cats and weeding gardens (again, each of which pay a minimum of 500 dollars)?
c. Non-ninja people can do these simple jobs, but they are paid way less, which would then lead to the conclusion that Konoha is an oppressive society that practically treats non-ninjas like slaves.
d. Kishimoto had no clue what he was doing when he said that 1 ryo equals 10 yen.
As you can see, this entire absurdity rests upon the idea that 1 ryo is equal to 10 Japanese yen. If it were modified a little bit (e.g. if 1 ryo was instead equal to, say, 1 Japanese yen; or, even better, if the ryo didn’t have any real-world equivalency), then this problem would cease to exist. But the exchange rate is canon, and the absurdity remains true.
Unexplored ideas
+Here are two things I briefly thought of, but which I didn’t explore any further:
Often when you have a huge population and a small amount of money, social unrest and conflict is pretty much guaranteed. This greatly fits Konoha, in that it is relatively poor yet it also has the biggest population among all the villages. Could this be the reason why Konoha seems to have had more internal discord among its population compared to the other villages, or is it just because we don’t have enough information about the other villages? Or, is my entire premise false here?
+How possible is it to come up with a somewhat accurate number for the actual populations and economies of each village? At least for population, maybe one could look at zoomed out images of the village and make an estimate based on the area/number of houses/etc?
