This should be Harano's fault. During the famine, Harano ordered the opening of iron fields all over the Chita Peninsula, even finding several small riverbed iron sand deposits. They dug out iron sand that nature had accumulated over thousands and tens of thousands of years, leading to iron prices in Wanjin dropping off a cliff on the spot.
At the same time, after disaster relief, in order to recover quickly, Harano ordered the "State-Owned Iron Workshop" to sell various ironware at low prices. As a result, the market became nearly saturated for a time, and small private iron workshops like theirs just couldn't handle it—Endo Chiyoda's ironware orders kept getting lower in price month by month, and the quantity she wanted also decreased every month. They had a whole workshop full of people to feed too!
That's why they banded together, planning to end their consignment contract with Harano and see if they could sell their goods farther afield by themselves, to make a bit more money.
