I thought today we'd take a look through my silver coin collection at the Japanese ones I have. I'll include some thoughts and info on what we are looking at so you can keep up.

First a few words on how I started collecting these.

I had been following @trumpman's coin posts for some time. They appealed to me because I have always been interested in coins. The fact that the coins contain silver is cool, don't get me wrong, but the coins themselves were what interested me the most. In this way you could say I'm more of a numismatist than a stacker.

When I was a little kid my dad first introduced me to coin collecting. I don't remember how old I was, but this would have been some time in elementary school, so maybe around nine or ten. He bought me one of those cardboard books that you can push the coins into precut holes for US pennies. I started looking at the dates of all pennies I came across. Not long after getting that book I came across a 1909 VDB penny which if memory serves was the second slot in the book, right after the 1909 penny. I remember my dad telling me that that penny was worth about a dollar and being amazed by that. I was hooked!

(According to the web one in good condition goes for around $10 now.)

I filled up most of the book. I never did find many of the rare years. My grandpa had some steel war pennies that he gave me so that was cool. In addition to filling up that book, I also kept a can where I saved any wheat pennies I found. I always had my eyes open for an indian-head penny, but I never found one. This would have been the mid 1980s, so those were mostly all out of circulation by that point. I never stopped hoping to find one, though!

I never really moved on to other coins in a serious way, but I always enjoyed coins after that point. I wonder if all those pennies I saved are still somewhere at my parent's house packed up somewhere in the basement.

Anyway, so I followed along and really enjoyed Trumpman's coin posts. Not long after I discovered a small coin shop near me and I was motivated to start buying some of what I discovered there. I started posted about them and not long after the fine folks at #silvergoldstackers asked me to be a member of their group.

Since then I've been buying coins as I find them and posting about my buys about once or so every week. Mostly Japanese coins, but occasionally a US coin that I manage to come across. I'm not chasing years (yet) just trying to get one of every type and design produced that was either made with silver or has some kind of historic significance.

For this post we'll just stick with the silver coins. I do have others, but silver is such a nice bonus when coin collecting.

Mainly I've been targeting the modern era of Japan from when they started a new coin system in 1871 until when that system altered due to the hyperinflation of WWII.

At the time the yen that we all know was equal to a US dollar and was subdivided into 100 units called sen (銭). This sen unit would have been the most common currency for the average person at the time. A number of sen coins were produced, ranging from 1/2 sen up to 50 sen. I haven't gotten all the coins nor all the designs of each one, but I have managed to get a few.

^{This is the 10 sen. The sunburst and wreath are the second design. The dragon was the first. The back of the dragon is a wreath.}

^{This is the 20 sen. The bigger one is the first design. They shrunk the coin for the second version}

^{With the dragon one flipped over}

^{The 50 sen. You can see again they shrunk the coin when they moved to the second design. The first was about US half-dollar size. The second, US quarter size.}

^{With that dragon flipped over}

At the time there was also a silver yen coin, which was basically the same size as the US silver dollar. These things are cool but, man, they go for a ton from collectors. You'd be lucky to find one for less than $100—one that's not a fake anyway; a ton of fakes of this coin are produced in China. I was lucky to get this one for a decent price:

In the post WWII era the sen was dropped as a unit, leaving only the yen, which dropped down to ¥360 = $1 at the lowest, before climbing and stabilizing around ¥100 = $1 which it stayed near for a long time. During the time Japan started minting ¥100 coins with silver. I have all three that they did.

^{Each row is a one of the three designs}

Of the pre WWII coins, the dragon design is my favorite. But of the post WWII ones, I love the ¥100 with the phoenix (top row), mainly for the design of the back, which I really dig.

That bottom row design was a special one made for the 1964 Olympics. They also made a 90% silver ¥1000 one.

We'll end with the odd man out. Jumping back before 1871 to the old money system, we have this 99% silver shu. This is a cool coin to have!

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What one jumps out at you?

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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.