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10 Yen

Issuer Bank of Japan
Year 1885
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Currency Yen (1871-date)
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Reverse description The reverse is dominated by a large green guilloche medallion at centre, incorporating the denomination and a legal warning text regarding counterfeiting. A red seal of the Director of the Treasury is applied at lower left, with bilingual Japanese and Western numerals denoting the value flanking the central vignette.
Reverse lettering       拾
    各刑變銀
    本法造行
   處條偽ニ券兌
10  断ニ造係ノ換  YEN
   ス照紙ル偽
    シ幣罪造
    テノハ 
     
  金   圓
  庫
  局
  長
(Translation: Ten 10 yen The crime of altering and reproducing a convertible banknote shall be dealt with in accordance with this article 12 of the Penal Code. Yen Director of treasury)
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Comments

This was among the first notes issued under the Convertible Banknote Regulations of 1885, which obligated the Bank of Japan to redeem its paper in silver on demand — a system designed to stabilize a currency that had been badly damaged by the inflationary government notes of the early Meiji period. The Bank of Japan had only been established in 1882, and these first convertible issues were a deliberate assertion of institutional credibility.

The Printing Bureau had been producing government documents and stamps since 1871, and by 1885 was capable of reasonably sophisticated intaglio work without foreign contract printers — a point of some national pride at the time.

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