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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Dnas, post: 7820747, member: 93707&quot;]Ok, I think I may have something.....</p><p><br /></p><p>Ikegaya in Japanese is written:&nbsp; 池ケ谷</p><p>It means &quot;valley pond&quot; or similar: 池 = ike = pond, 谷 = ya = valley.</p><p><br /></p><p>However, valley can be either &quot;ya&quot; or &quot;tani&quot; (the kanji can have more than one sound/pronunciation. For example &quot;town&quot; can be &quot;cho&quot; or &quot;machi&quot;).</p><p><br /></p><p>It means that there are other &quot;readings&quot; of the Kanji for Ikegaya, and in this case, it includes:</p><p>Ikenotani, Iketani, Ikeya</p><p><br /></p><p>There was village area in the town of Oasa-cho, which is now part of Naruto City, Tokushima Prefecture in Shikoku Island, called Ikenotani (or now called Oasacho Ikenotani). There were a number of villages adjacent to Ikenotani, all a part of Oasa-cho (Oasa Town).They were all villages in Meiji times, but they are now all a part of Oasa-cho, Naruto City. You can still see on the map a lot of rice fields, so in some ways, not much has changed.</p><p><br /></p><p>After the Edo period and the Meiji Restoration, the feudal Samurai system was dismantled. To replace this system, a city-town-village system was imposed, in year Meiji 22, 1887.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think that this could be an Ikenotani/Ikegaya village token used for currency/exchange in out-lying areas, possibly struck in Osaka. Osaka and Kobe are only about 50-60km from Naruto City port, and only 3-4 km at each end of Awaji Island to Kobe, so getting coins/tokens struck at Osaka Mint would have been practical.</p><p>The Romaji (English) characters may have been added to make it consistent with the currency of the day, which had English on them. And it may have been that the local village needed tokens for exchange, but perhaps they were not adopted, and were just experimental.</p><p><br /></p><p>There could also have been a military garrison in the area, for which the token was used.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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