While I was in a nice flow of sharing some things old, I figured maybe I can throw in something new in between as well. I never expected this to be the first of the something new shiny on the way because it was literally shipped on Wednesday and delivered on Thursday. Honestly, this never happened to me before, especially not using a drop off point. I'm not complaining though because the two coins I ordered from the Royal Spanish mint are delayed so much that they probably won't start processing the orders from two weeks ago until early September, so they told me.
Although I have plenty of stuff to list and sell, I hate the part where you have to deal with people asking questions and then never getting back to you or ending up buying your stuff. Yet every now and then, I list a few things and hope for the best. It's not a must to get rid of it, it just feels nice to have a bit of balance to buy something that I wish to have in my collection. Most stuff that I sell takes in space, while my buys are usually coin related so at least I had a win there.
Usually, when I sell something, I already have something bookmarked as favourite to buy when some balance appears in my wallet but this time the balance was unused for about 1,5 months. I aimed for some old coins from Japan as these kept popping up on my feed and they are little pieces of art if you ask me. Every time I clicked on them, they were reserved already, sadly. This time I went browsing and found a seller who had 1 coin from Japan which I wanted to buy. I gathered 4 coins in total (not all silver) and decided to spend a few bucks extra to make shipping worth it. I didn't expect them to arrive this quickly though.
I don't know about you but I love the flower designs on this coin. Besides ceramic art hunting, I know very little (actually too little) about Japan but the things that I know usually involves beauty in some way. The fine art coming from Japan is incredible and both me and my partner love it when we bump on art from Japan on flea markets. Yet, I never really found Japanese coins there so I could admire them in person.
Online will have to do for now, but this seller had a lot of reviews and there's buyers protection as well so if the item would not be as described, I could return it without any costs on my hand. I will first show you the reverse below:
This is the info from Numista:
If you didn't spot it yet, now look closely.. it's immediately clear to me that this is not the coin the seller said it is, sigh. Of course it's possible that it's a modern mint of this old coin and therefore less detailed but so far I had a hard time finding anything about it. The listing said it's silver and three of the 5 coins I have sound like silver to me as well. Still, I'm quite disappointed to be fair because I see that the original one is far more sophisticated than the one I'm holding.
Even though I first thought it was dirt making the letters pop more and therefore look different, now I see the fine Japanese art vs the cheap rip-off which I already considered pretty the first day I had it. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted, lol.
This instantly brings back memories to these art hunting days where we we'd find Japanese ceramics, in the beginning of our journey we were fooled by the rip offs but at some point, you easily spot the differences and often it came down to the same thing: the real stuff was much more detailed. More sophisticated so the speak. I can say that this is a great example of that as well.
I opened a dispute to see if this is a breach of their terms selling it as if it's that coin while it's probably a reproduction of the old one. And also to find out if the seller admits it, I'm not sure yet if I will return it because it wasn't an expensive purchase and I still like it. In fact, I was actually thinking that I should buy more small coins like this so I can hear the silver sound more often without ruining these capsuled 1oz ones..
Anyone who has more info, maybe you know anything about this @dbooster? I'm happy to hear about it..
All pictures above are my own.
