Japanese 416 One Yen 900 - Authenticity?

Your coin is an 1892 1 yen of the more common variety (the last flame overlaps 3 spines on the tail). It is in my opinion certainly genuine and looks to be a good AU.
It also doesn't seem to suffer from some of the hairlines that many of this type tend to have that can put them in the details grade.
However there is one thing that looks a little suspicious to me which is the slightly weird toning of the reverse. The color is quite strange and I have never really seen it exactly that way, it is also missing in the field so it may have been wiped or very lightly cleaned. I would have to look at it in hand to properly assess that . There is also a scratch there which wouldn't be enough by itself to put it in details but again would have to look at it.
Overall, I would suggest this was sent for grading and potential conservation as the discoloration on the reverse might be some kind of residue which someone like NCS could probably deal with
As for value an AU 55 1892 of the common variety is probably worth around 150 USD as a bid from a coin dealer though you could probably sell it for more on an auction site or ebay but that would be for a coin that is problem free and not a detail grade. Just for your information, an 1892 where the flame overlaps 4 spines will be worth over 1000 in strong AU.
So good luck ... be careful bidding in terms of value (remember grading it and conserving is likely to cost a bit and also it could still be cleaned) but you can rest assured that is a genuine coin at least in my opinion - for guidance I have every single 1 yen in every variety and I have maybe 10 different 1892s (I shoudl probably sell some!)...

To me, there's nothing suspicious about the toning of this coin in my opinion.

Many of the Japanese silver one yen coins that end up outside of Japan tend to be pretty nice shiny coins.

However, Japan is a country that is very hot and humid in summer time and if you search around for silver coins in Japan, they often have some dull brown toning like that coin. There's a lot of quite well worn coins around as well. They have "regular" toning but other types as well:

This one looks like it's been in sweaty hands, where the open flat areas away from the detail have contacted and toned a bit darker:


This one looks like it's gotten a more even brown tone over time, but on the open flat areas away from the detail, some of the tone has rubbed off to a lighter color. You can also see a chop mark.


This one has suffered some water by the looks of things, and has toned very dark and blotchy. It was cheap because it was so black, so I decided to immerse it in hot water and sodium bicarbonate. This process removed a lot of the very black blotchy toning to reveal the colors. It may look ok here but it's still an unattractive coin. I don't normally clean coins but this was so cheap (about $40) and very blotchy black. In Japan, they don't like toned coins, so this must have been hard to sell to Japanese buyers. The condition is AU, with very little wear.


I lived in Japan for 16 years so I accumulated around 80 one yen coins, with only a few missing dates/varieties.
It's actually fun to search out these less than perfect looking coins, some of which can be AU or better but a little unattractive due to brown toning.

Since this thread started out pretty generic, may we use it as an "aggregator" to ask opinions on authenticity for this particular coin?

Thank you very much!

As far as I can tell it looks totally legit to me
The 1914 is very common and is only conditionally rare, and so this one could be just an awesome fake trying to get MS65 or better which would make it worth having a struck coin made out of silver but the problem with that is that there are some rim dings and also the ball the dragon is holding is badly scuffed which is actually very rare on these coins and hence bad.
Also the coin looks as if it may have been wiped but is in otherwise great shape.
NGC wrote that some of the better fakers are beginning to use actual dies taken from genuine coins for fakes that are not the traditionally faked expensive 1 yens (1870, 1874, 1875, 1878, 1879) and I recently saw a bunch of 1891 1 yens all sold together that looked as if they might be fakes with the gin mark also done very well (this used to be a telltale sign of a fake for the varieites which had an 1897 mint chopmark )
However, I do think that the one you sent is indeed a genuine coin from year 3 of the Taisho era.

Personally I have a 63+ that is at least as good but that's just an opinion... as I say the scuffs on the ball for me are a no no.
At this point I am only looking for a 66 as I have a 65 already which I found actually on ebay and had graded.
My 63+ cost around 400 bucks when I bought it if I recall but it was long ago when these were rather cheaper. Some 64's have recently traded around 800-900 bucks (with auction premium) and there is one on HA right now looking for bids with the auction ending on June 21st.
I would expect you could sell the thing on ebay for the price that trades at HA minus auction premium minus around 10% because you are not HA.

So 0.9*(850 /1.2 ) = 637.5 and you got it for 620. :)
That's pretty much exactly right.
I think you got a good deal at 620 especially if you think the ball ding is less important (because the rest of the coin is gem )
So nice one well done:)

Ginza is the top tier. For anything graded they will always be more expensive but on the other hand for graded stuff they tend to only buy stuff that is at the very least top 50% for the grade so often their offerings are superior to the actual grade.
Ginza is actually a bargain for filler coins because they know how to recognize cleans and issues and adjust the price respectively. I got some of the rarest varieties that way when I was first starting.

As for the pricing well my reasoning for individual sellers on ebay (it is different if it is a well known coin shop) is as follows. If you are selling your coin at HA what do you get. You get the price WITHOUT the premium minus the fees that HA charges. Now if you bought the coin at HA yourself you get a discount on their charges or it is sometimes free.
So look at it this way. You buy from HA and you basically get a coin at price X. Why would you spend the same amount on ebay where they don't guarantee the coin and they don't have experts looking at it. You wouldn't. If you bought that coin on ebay you would expect to pay less for it.
One other thing, HA would TELL you in the auction if they felt the coin was overgraded. Not directly but they would mention things like touch marks and handling and if it sounds more than it should be for the grade you can tell.
On other coins - I bought one sight unseen that I knew was MS70 even though it was ungraded because they specifically said they could not identify a single mark. It did indeed grade out as a 70.
So if you think about it why would you ever pay on ebay more than the HA price minus the premium because you get much more comfort from HA than ebay.
The only reason to buy on ebay is from the regular coin shops that also advertise on ebay and there you pay for A) the coin shop's guarantee and B) the convenience of getting exactly what you want right away rather than having to wait for an HA auction to show it.
Hence if you want an 1870 1 yen at ms65 you would probably need to wait 3 months for one of the signature auctions on HA to roll by. You could instead get one on ebay tomorrow from a top coin shop obline but you would probably have to pay up to 1k or something over the price it would come to on HA.
So yeah the fact that it is graded (assuming you do your homework to check that the graded coin is the correct one because there are TONNES of fake coins in convincing TPGC slabs) puts it closer but still the guarantee that you get from HA and coin shops is valuable.
I for example have sometimes had people try to sell on ebay rare varieties that aren't in fact that variety. Often it was misattributed by PCGS or NGC - that happens quite often. I have had people sell for example type 1 1870 1Y coins as type 2 because it was attributed as such but was obviously type 1. A coin shop or HA would catch that, the non coinshop ebay seller may not even if they are being honest.
Of course there are some sellers on ebay that are great collectors and so are virtually as reliable or more reliable than coin shops and their sales command something closer to what HA would .
At the end even with coins you get what you pay for except for that ridiculous guy who I won't name that shows "discounted" offers which are at 10X of the fair price of the coin... I have no idea why he is allowed to continue ...