I believe that these four coins are contemporary Chinese, but I don't read Chinese. Can anyone help me identify them more definitively including the years?
Showa 63, 55, 52 and 56. You can add the Imperial date to 1925 to get the Western dates. These are pretty modern and go for about face value. I collect the ones from the 50s with the reeded edges, which are worth slightly more but not much.
To be fair, those are all Chinese-style characters on the coins, with no hiragana or katakana. Most Japanese coins are entirely in kanji. Modern Chinese coins look somewhat different because the character simplifications are much more drastic, but traditional Japanese and Chinese characters look very similar. Examples: "Country" in traditional Japanese and Chinese: 國 In modern Japanese and Chinese: 国 A few characters have different simplifications in modern Japanese and Chinese. Sen/Qián (1/100th of a yen in Japanese, or money in general in Chinese): Traditional Japanese and Chinese: 錢 Modern (simplified) Japanese: 銭 Modern (simplified) Chinese: 钱 The easiest way to identify coins if you can't read characters is to learn to recognize the country names and look for those. 大日本 = Imperial Japan 日本 = Modern Japan 中華民國 = Republic of China/Taiwan 中华人民共和国 = People's Republic of China
