{"id":43,"date":"2015-04-15T13:34:07","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T13:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/heritage-placements\/?p=43"},"modified":"2015-11-16T09:10:52","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T09:10:52","slug":"numismatics-blog-post-5-emily-graham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/heritage-placements\/2015\/04\/15\/numismatics-blog-post-5-emily-graham\/","title":{"rendered":"Numismatics blog post 5 – Emily Graham"},"content":{"rendered":"

A trip around the World<\/strong><\/p>\n

On\u00a01st April I was given a chance to take a break from my German pfennigs.\u00a0The Harris Museum, like most public centres, has a donation box. This is for visitors to make cash donations towards the museum. Either\u00a0visitors misunderstood and thought it was for donations towards the coin collection, or they just wanted to leave their mark.\u00a0The Harris staff had emptied the donation box and found\u00a0over 200 foreign coins<\/strong>! Korean, Russian, Spanish,\u00a0Greek, Swedish, Gibraltar, Falklands, Canada, the US and so many more.\"foreign<\/a><\/p>\n

Some of the foreign coins donated to the Harris (photo courtesy of Matt Ball)<\/p>\n

I like to think that these coins show where the visitors to the Harris\u00a0come from, because that would be amazing. So that Wednesday, I helped Matt – the Money Matters\u00a0project curator – catalogue half of them. This definitely made for a nice break from the German pfennigs. There were so many interesting coins! Below\u00a0is one\u00a0of my favourites. Japanese yen coin<\/strong> This coin is from Japan. Now, I do think the branch is quite a pretty design but that isn’t the reason why I like this coin.<\/p>\n

\"japanese<\/a>Sprouting branch on Japanese 1 yen coin<\/p>\n

I really like this coin because of the four Japanese symbols on the other side of the coin.<\/p>\n

\"japanese<\/a>The reverse side<\/p>\n

Those four symbols are very interesting. You would assume – as Matt and I did at first – that each one is a number and so it says the date. You would be half right. It does say the date. But Japanese coins do not follow the same\u00a0western\u00a0Gregorian calendar that Britain does. Instead, the Japanese calendar is divided into ‘eras’, which is why it is called the Japanese era calendar, or\u00a0Nengo (Reign Era).<\/em>\u00a0These eras start and end with the birth and death of the Japanese emperor. To read the date on modern Japanese coins, you have to identify the\u00a0first two symbols<\/em>\u00a0to an emperor. The two on our coin read\u00a0\u5e73\u6210<\/strong>, which means\u00a0Heisei<\/strong>. This is the era corresponding to the current reigning Japanese emperor Akihito. The\u00a0third symbol<\/em>\u00a0is a number.\u00a0 This number identifies what year, within that particular era, the coin was made. Our coin bears this symbol: \"first<\/a><\/p>\n

This confused us for a while because it doesn’t correspond to any of the Japanese symbols for numbers. However, it is actually the symbol for ‘Gan’, which on coins essentially means\u00a0‘1’ or ‘First’.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fourth and final symbol is quite simple. \"year<\/a><\/p>\n

It means\u00a0‘year’.<\/strong> All of this means\u00a0that this coin was made in the first year of Emperor\u00a0Akihito’s reign, which was… *drumroll* …\u00a01989!<\/strong> You have no idea how proud I felt after finally\u00a0figuring\u00a0that out. If you want to learn more about Japanese coins or the era calendar, the websites below are very useful:<\/p>\n