Need Some Help With The Years On These Coins.

Alright so tell me if I did these two correctly. Using the site, I right in saying that these two coins are from the 52th year of the Showa rein or 1977? What are the denominations on them? And are they Chinese?

I still need to know the denomination. And are they chinese?

These Japanese coins use chinese characters called kanji. Kanji is part of the Japanese writing system that has both simplified and traditional chinese characters, but some characters have different meaning than original Chinese.

Disagree echizento.

Dai nihon will be like this:


Whereas it should be called as nihon koku


Watch out though, calling Japan as dai nihon will highly insult the Korean and Chinese - that was the time when Japan ruled Korea and terrified China under the Imperial era.

Thanks for the Japanese reading lessons guys. That's one thing I want to work on in the next year. I've got some basic speaking/comprehension skills, but getting over the initial hurdle of reading characters rather than a western alphabet is tough.

Wow nice link Sakura. I was well aware of the micro letters on the obverse but not on the reverse!

By the way, there is a good reason why I wouldn't encourage people to learn kanji - there are just too many ways to read it. For instance the letter "kuni", when you add words to it, it can become either kuni or koku or "ko" in various other forms. When you have two "kuni" put together, it becomes kuniguni. At least, the only similar term between dai nihon and nihon koku is the word nihon, which just means "Japan". If that was complicated, there are other words that can have more than 5 ways to read it. It is a big mistake to read it as it is. The word "dai" can be read as oo, tai, dai or in rare cases "ya". For instance, if you know the character for Taisho, why isn't it called Daisho or Oosho. Figures. I gave up learning years ago.

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By the way, there is a good reason why I wouldn't encourage people to learn kanji - there are just too many ways to read it. For instance the letter "kuni", when you add words to it, it can become either kuni or koku or "ko" in various other forms. When you have two "kuni" put together, it becomes kuniguni. At least, the only similar term between dai nihon and nihon koku is the word nihon, which just means "Japan". If that was complicated, there are other words that can have more than 5 ways to read it. It is a big mistake to read it as it is. The word "dai" can be read as oo, tai, dai or in rare cases "ya". For instance, if you know the character for Taisho, why isn't it called Daisho or Oosho. Figures. I gave up learning years ago

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Wow, I thought English was the only language that was that difficult. Sounds like it would just be easier to use your site and post here for you to answer gx.....

gxseries, it's true that kanji has many readings but each reading is distinguishable according to the context. As a general rule, single character and words incorporating the okurigana are read with the "kun" reading, while a compound kanjis without okurigana are read with "on" reading except for cases like people's names or ateji words. The word Taishou uses the "on" reading "tai" because that was the given name for the era. Another example is the word "daimyo" that uses "dai" instead of "tai" in order to convey the meaning of the word. "Oo/Ou" is not used for Taishou because that is "kun" reading and "shou" is "on". It's either all "on" or all "kun". Memorizing the readings is difficult but if we understand how to use the characters then it'll be easier. There're other points to discuss but I save those for another times as I'm getting off topic here.

echizento, actually there are about 20,000 kanji recorded in Japanese but only about a quarter of that are in use today including characters for literature, science and tech. 1,850 are the number of characters permitted for official publication after WW2, and that amount was later increased to 1,945.