I try to resist buying a lot of coin. There is a coin shop right nearby that I stop at every now and again to look at old coins. They are usually expensive enough that I can more easily resist buying. But ebay.... ebay is dangerous. For that reason I usually avoid it. But then I read 
I got this guy in the mail the other day and have been admiring it.
(Sorry, I was going to get out my dSLR for glam shots, but my kids are up now... I wasn't fast enough, so iPhone snaps will have to suffice.)
The 1964 100 yen Olympics coin is a commemorative coin that was issued by the Japanese government to celebrate the 1964 Olympics held in Tokyo. The coin has a diameter of 22.5mm, weighs 4.8g, and is made of 30% copper, 10% zinc, and 60% silver.
The text under the 100 says "Showa 39 year" which is the 39th year of the reign of the Showa Emperor (Hirohito), or 1964.
The back gives us a little bit more design, with the torch and the Olympic symbol. The text reads nihon koku, "Japan" on top and hyaku en, "100 yen" on the bottom.
80 million of these Olympic 100 yen coins were produced. It was a commemorative coin but was intended to be circulated alongside the regular ¥100 coins (which were also 60% silver at the time), but collectors bought them all and there is no record of any of them actually entering circulation.
I don't know how popular ¥100 coins were back in the day. There were ¥100 banknotes in circulation at the time and they remained until they were removed around 1974 I think. Silver did start to spike up around the late 60s so the silver in the ¥100 coins was removed around that time. That alone probably made the coins pretty popular for collectors, but for ordinary people, they might have preferred bills until they had no choice.
Anyway, this is a great one to have.
The 1964 Olympics were a huge deal to Japan. It was the first Olympics to be held in Asia. It was a symbol of Japan's recovery from the war and a symbol of Japan's reformation as a peaceful state. It allowed the country to show off fancy new technology like color television broadcasts.
Japan used the games to push sports education throughout the nation. Children in Japan still have one of the highest favorable levels of sports participation of developed countries as a result of this.
As for technology, maybe one of the biggest introduced to coincide with the games was the bullet train, linking Osaka and Tokyo.
Overall it was a really big deal.
They issued a few other coins for the games. There was a sweet ¥1000 coin that I want to try to get next.
| David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
