China, Korea and Japan all use characters from the Chinese writing system on their coins, making it very difficult for people who are not familiar with them to identify the origin of many Asian coins. The purpose of this posting is to show that it really isn’t all that hard; and that with a few basics in mind, anyone can go to the right section of the Krause catalogs, for modern Japanese, Korean, and Chinese coins. Although in each language (Japanese, Korean and major dialects of Chinese) the same characters have different pronunciations, they carry substantially the same meanings, enabling educated Asians to communicate in writing despite having no common spoken language. In the Japanese language this writing system is called “Kanji”. Japan adopted European-style round struck coinage in 1870, Korea made the changeover in 1891, and in China, where many provincial governments issued coinage that circulated side-by-side with Imperial coins, the changeover occurred sporadically during the last years of the Empire through the first year of the Republic (1912) On Japanese coins, the side with the characters “Dai Ni Hon” (“Great Japan”) is defined as the obverse. From 1870 to 1948 the characters appeared in the traditional right to left direction depicted here: . Since then they appear in western-style left to right order. Pre-WWII Korean coins, and many South Korean coins, have either the characters “Tai Han” or “Tai Cho Son” (“Great Korea”). The “Tai” character is identical to the “Dai” on Japanese coins. Some South Korean, and most North Korean coins have English legends. That character does not appear on Chinese coins. It is beyond the scope of this posting to cover the different country designations on Chinese Imperial, pre-1949 Chinese Republic, Communist China, and Taiwanese coins. (British Hong Kong coins and Portugese Macao coins may have Chinese characters on them, but they always have the colony name in English or Portugese.) Here's a link to information on dating Japanese coins. We'll talk more about that, and about dating Korean/Chinese material, at another time.
