Hi, in a prior thread I mentioned that my son and I are working our way through a bucket of unidentified foreign coins. The first one was solved by the board in less than 24 hours - on a Saturday no less! - so I have high hopes for the next challenge as well. :smile Here's a scan that includes both sides of the coin. I had to lighten it a bit to show some detail after the scan. One side has an oriental temple and the other side says 10 followed by oriental characters. By the way, we had another set of coins that we were able to identify as being from Taiwan because the back of the coin had an outline of a country. We guessed that it must be the source country for the coins, so we scanned a world map looking for a likely candidate. Once we found one, I searched for "taiwan coins" and found several hits that matched our coins. So even if we can't read the script, we were still able to identify the coins. Fun times.
Wow, y'all are fast! It is a bronze coin and does have a reeded edge. I guess tidbits like that should have been included in my first post. Or maybe not, since you're figuring it out so fast anyway... I only have a few more unidentified coins. Will have to see if someone can get it faster than this one. Ten minutes. That's just crazy...
Yes. If you spend just one day in Tokyo and buy a cup of coffee, a newspaper and some lunch you'd find one similar in your change. An important note: reeded edge or "giza jyu" as the Japanese call them are more rare since collectors hold on to them when they find them. A good analogy in the USA would be finding a common wheat penny in your change.
Yep...cause they made 466,000,000 of them...just that year. 3 million more than a 1979 Jefferson nickel.
Interesting. I went back and checked, and one of mine is reeded edge but the other is not. I assume you got this from the script on one side of the coin? I posted the obverse of one and the reverse of the other, so if you can tell me which side contains the date I will be able to date at least one of my coins....
This is the best coin forum there is bar none so you came to the right place! I have been collecting for nearly 26 years now, and you'll see over time that a lot of the foreign coins you come across will be repeats. For a few reasons. First, many of them are long-term issues. Your Japanese coin was minted for over 50 years... there are other foreign coins that had the same design for double that...and for different values too! Second, a lot of other countries have large populations despite their smaller size compared to the U.S. Japan is a perfect example. They have over 125 million people in an area smaller than California (the U.S. is around 310 million in total I believe). With that many people, they needed to mint a LOT of coins. Thirdly, yes, there are over 190 countries on our wonderful planet, but probably 90% of the coins you come across will be from maybe 50 of those. Put all this together, and if you grab 100 foreign coins at random, you'll probably have a couple duplicates. Just think..at first glance, I'd say they minted a good 25 billion of those 10 yen at least. That is over 80 apiece for every man, woman and child in the U.S. Just putting into perspective how common some of these foreign coins are.
