Can anyone tell me what this token is saying? Is this a Korean War message? In my sick mind, I'm thinking it's Daffy Duck giving the US the universal salute, what do you think?
Great! I'm lucky I didn't post it on pebay as a propaganda token. So I guess he isn't even giving the almighty bird, right?
The token is likely Japanese, but I couldn't trace it to anything specific. The characters appear to be 能登合館 but the third character on the token has a slightly different lower box. I haven't been able to determine if 合 is actually the right character, but it probably is correct. The first two characters, 能登, could refer to the "Noto Penninsula" in north central Japan. The last two characters, 合館, seem to refer to cabins, but I'm not sure if that makes any sense in the context. All 4 characters 能登合館 don't seem to turn up anything promising at all. Since there are no fast and easy references to the token, that makes it more likely to be a pachinko token. I don't think any kind of an authoritative reference exists for them, to my knowledge.
I think the last two characters are 会館 (kaikan = meeting hall). The Noto Peninsula is a scenic place near Ishikawa on the Sea of Japan.
That could be. I thought about 会, but then I saw that the coin manufacturers were able to reproduce the same angles on the 館 character much more accurately. But maybe they cut corners? If 会 is correct, they didn't do a very good job of reproducing it on the token. But 能登会館 does link to a reference to a pachinko parlor called "Pachi7" (https://pachiseven.jp/halls/detail/430). So perhaps the coin is a pachinko token located in the Noto Conference Hall? In any case 能登会館 appears to return more results.
It's just a stylized font I think. The stroke in the top of the "box" part of 合 is actually a horizontal stroke which then hooks down, so it wouldn't ever extend horizontally past the left side of the "box." They just extended the stroke in the bottom left corner of 会 to make it look symmetric. You can kind of get a feel for this kind of stuff after a while. I lived in Ishikawa for a summer and visited the Noto Peninsula, though I haven't been in any pachinko halls there...
