Hello And A Query | Japan 10 Yen 1953

Hello, and welcome to the forum!
This is a Japanese 10 yen issued from 1951 on. The top pic is just blurry enough for me not to be able to see the date.

No, it's definitely a 10-yen coin, Y-73 or later, bronze. The bottom pic needs a quarter-turn to the left to be horizontal.

The date, for the record, is underneath the '10'. Quick Japanese lesson!

一 - 1 (ichi)
二 - 2 (ni)
三 - 3 (san)
å›› - 4 (shi)
äº" - 5 (go)
å.­ - 6 (roku)
七 - 7 (shichi)
å.« - 8 (hachi)
� - 9 (kyuu)
� - 10 (jyuu)

So looking for those symbols, I think I see 昭å'ŒäºŒå��å.«å¹´ under the 10. The middle bit, if I'm correct, would be 2-10-8 or which is 2 tens and 8, or 28. The last symbol (å¹´) is nen which is year. So Year 28.

The two symbols in front are the era, in this case, Showa. This means that the coin was minted in the 28th year of the Showa era, which happens to be 1953. There's really only four eras you have to worry about for coin collecting: Meiji (明治), Taishou (大正), Showa (昭å'Œ) and Heisei (å¹³æˆ�). As long as you can find year one for each era, you can just do a little math to get the right year. Meiji year one is 1868, Taishou 1912, Showa 1926, and Heisei 1989.

Easiest way to do the calculation is to subtract one from the era year one, and add the number on the coin! (1925+28=1953.)

Hope that helps!

(p.s. You may need to play with your settings for your web browser under 'Character Encoding' in order to read all the symbols on this post!)