Why I love my mail lady!

satootoko

The color in the obverse picture is accurate, the reverse isn't.

oldshep

Man, I would love her too if she brought me goodies like those - give her my address
Shep

tbirde56

Gotta love those phoenixes!

SYRACUSIAN

Nice - the more I see Japanese coins, the more I like them.

hamiltonjh

Red X's...cant see them.

sumnom

Beautiful! I especially like the pheonix design.

cosmicdebris

Awesome coins can you send your mail lady to my house?

Stork

Let Cosmicdebris have the mail lady, just forward the mail to me... that is a lovely 50 sen!

Steve27

Nice coin Roy, I was looking at one of these on-line, yours is much nicer.

sumnom

It just occurred to me now that there seems to be a parallel in Japanese and US design changes in the early 20th century. In the early to mid-Taisho, the Japanese mint abandoned the more staid designs of the late-Meiji (dragon and sun patterns) for the far more creative and aestheticly pleasing designs of employed from the 1910's to the early 1940's. In the US as well, the mint stepped away from the Barber designs, the IHC, and the Morgans from 1909 to 1921 and moved on to the wheatie, the buffalo nickel, the mercury dime, the SL quarter, the WL half and the peace dollar. I wonder if there was a link. Does anyone know why the Japanese started overhauling their coin designs in the 1910's?

And by the way, don't get me wrong on the Meiji designs. Although they are more conservative, I really do like them quite a lot.

wybrit

Great piece! I'm with Syracusian - I like Japanese coins more each time I see them.

satootoko

<< <i>Does anyone know why the Japanese started overhauling their coin designs in the 1910's?. >>

The layout of the JNDA Catalog makes me doubt that there is any discussion of that fact, even though I can't read the text other than dates and coin descriptions. None of my English language references cover the design change question.

Perhaps the reign changes had something to do with it, since the first new designs appeared pretty early in the reign of the Taisho Emperor, and continued under the Showa Emperor through the early part of World War II.

The later war-year coinage involved the greatest debasement of the coinage in Japanese history: from bronze (1 sen) and nickle (5 &10 sen) in 1940, through Aluminum-Bronze, Aluminum, Tin-Zinc, to the generally uncirculated baked clay of 1945.

In the postwar years the general circulation coinage is generally uninspired in design, but some of the commemoratives are quite striking, especially the ¥1000 silver Fujijyama design on the very first commem, minted for the '64 Tokyo Olympics, and the obverse of the 1990 Hana To Midori, the first ¥5,000 silver coin, which has the first - and (so far) only - effigy on a Japanese coin. an allegorical "nature".

sumnom

You see? Post war Japanese coins were dull, just like US coins. There must be a connection.

The Japanese red book has very little info outside of the basic numismatic stuff but it is only a catalogue.

There were a lot of social and political changes going on in Taisho Japan so one might guess that new designs came about with new faces at the mint or in the government. By this time the original oligarchs were largely out of the government and the political parties were coming to the fore.

This is all conjecture, of course. It would be interesting to find out why the new designs came out.

Askari

It could simply be due to the growing exposure to and acceptance of Western influences. A key reason for the US changing its designs was to have "more modern" coinage that looked "worthy" of such a great nation and Japan at that time was quite attuned to picking up the latest "sensitivities" deemed indicative a "superior" culture.

sumnom

I agree, Askari, although by the time we get into the Taisho, the Japanese were less liable to blindly mimic the west as they has in the first 20 years of the Meiji. There were all sorts of very radical changes going on within Japan in the 1910's and 1920's. There was a full fledged Japanese modernity that we can see reflected in the coinage of the day.