Japan Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga announced in a press conference Tuesday the themes and designs for the Kyoto and Shimane Prefectures ¥1,000 and ¥500 commemorative coins.
The Kyoto design features a scene from "The Tale of Genji," the literary romantic classic set in Kyoto and written by Murasaki Shikibu in the eleventh century. The Shimane design depicts an oval-shaped coin minted in the 16th century at the Iwami GinZan silver mine in Shimane.
The coins follow the July 1 ¥1,000 Hokkaido Commemorative release and are a part of the 8-year series of 94 coins honoring the 60th anniversary of the Local Autonomy Law, which in part, established each of Japan’s 47 prefectures.
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Japan will issue a new colorized Hokkaido commemorative silver coin featuring Japanese red-crowned cranes, a symbol of Hokkaido, flying above Hokkaido’s Lake Toya.
Japan’s Finance Minister, Fukushiro Nukaga, made the announcement Tuesday in a press conference after a cabinet meeting. Mr. Nukaga said a 1,000-yen Hokkaido commemorative coin would be issued this July in time for the Group of Eight summit, which will be held in Hokkaido.
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Japan’s Ministry of Finance plans to issue 500-yen (five dollar) coins commemorating the centenary of the Japanese immigration to Brazil, but a copyright disagreement regarding the initial coin design has caused a slight bump in the road.
The disputed coin design showed an image of the “Commemoration Statue in the Santos Port”, a monument built by a local association, the “Federation of the Associations of Provinces of Japan in Brazil”. The monument includes bronze sculptures of parents and a child standing in Santos, Brazil, the location where Japanese immigrants landed in 1908 after two months of voyage.
Japan had already minted 4.8 million of the Japan-Brazil Year of Exchange commemorative coins believing an agreement in place with the association covered the rights to reproduce the design. However, it was later learned that a Brazilian artist who Japan had no agreement with also held a copyright to the design.
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An 1880 Japanese gold coin with a face value of ¥2 was expected to sell for millions when auctioned by Japan’s Finance Ministry. An article last Tuesday about the coin in The Japan Times Online said everything in its title, Ministry hopes 1880 ¥2 coin fetches 10 million times that. ¥20 million was the expected take.
Not bad for a small coin that is 16.97 mm in diameter and weighs 3.33 grams.
A noted coin dealer in Tokyo’s Ginza district, Toshio Takeuchi, chairman of Ginza Coins Co., was quoted as saying:
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