So I have recently found this coin and have no clue what it is. There are either Chinese or Japanese symbols on it with an airplane in the center of the coin. The coin is identical on both sides. I think I posted a picture in this thread but this is my first time posting so I'm not sure if I did it correctly. Thank you!
Welcome to the site. You could have (or maybe should have) posted it under world coins. You might get more responses over there. The coin/token might have something to do with the Soviet shoot down of Korean flight 007 back in 1983. The plane on the coin is a 747.
It's probably a token to commemorate Japan Air Likes Flight 123, then. The crash of that aircraft - the largest death tool in history in the crash of a single plane - heavily impacted the Japanese psyche.
The characters are in katakana (one of the Japanese alphabets) and seem to read: シャンボセブン or roughly, "Shyanbosebun." When I look that up, I get a pachinko parlor (or "パチンコジャンボセブン"). So pachinko token may have been a great guess. If this reference matches, the parlor is located in northern Japan in or near Fukushima. The search led to this site (all in Japanese): http://www.p-world.co.jp/fukushima/jumbo7.htm The characters on the token appear at the top of the page right under the header reading "Welcome" and "We present pleasant time." I can't 100% guarantee that this information is correct, but it seems to match the characters on the token.
This is a Pachinko token. With it you buy so many little steel balls in the Pachinko parlour, put the balls into a machine and see how many you can retrieve the more you get returned the more yen you get back, its a very addictive game played throughout Japan.
Ah, sorry, I just noticed that you had already mentioned that above. I think that clinches it as a pachinko token for the parlor indicated. I'm not sure why it has an airplane on it, but perhaps it was a memorial token of sorts as others have mentioned. I searched in Japanese to see if I could find any more information, but nothing else turned up.
After thinking a little more, and this should have been obvious to me sooner, the katakana actually reads "Jumbo 7." The katakana alphabet is used mostly for foreign loan words and in Japanese an "n" often takes on an "m" sound. So "シャンボ" is actually "Jyanbo" or "Jumbo" and セブン is "sebun" or "seven" or "7." So the name of the pachinko parlor is "Jumbo7." Here is their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/1983.jumbo7 So the token reads "Jyambo Sebun" or "Jumbo Seven."
One last thought, I swear this is the last one , the airplane is probably just a play on the parlor's name, since the 747 is also known as a "Jumbo Jet." So "Jumbo7" "Jumbo Jet." Thank you for posting your token!
