Beautiful Japanese Yen

Hi all,
Had to chip in on the related subject of PRC counterfeits. One of my interests is US Trade dollars, and ebay is infamous as the market for counterfeits of this type coin. Raw coins go very cheap, and similar looking TPG slabbed coins go high. Even a Dillon Grain Scale is no longer enough, as someone above pointed out, the fakers are making correct weights, mass, and size now.
Let's face it , some of these coins are worth well into 4 figures, and there is a lot of profit potential there for the counterfeiters.

As Meijio3 said, on the low end it's hard to get hurt if you don't go for the high end coins...as an example, I bought several silver Chinese coins on ebay from a guy with a chinese name from New York for $10-12 each...the Krause catalog lists them for thousands, with tiny mint issues. I certainly didn't expect the real thing, but on the other hand, these examples make for a beautiful display...and by the way, you have to pay more than 10 or 12 for modern copies of US rare coins with the word "copy" stamped on them to make it legal.I've filled some holes in albums with these, particularly the ones I have no hope of ever finding (or affording).

all the best,
Dennis

OK I'm not going to lie, I was losing sleep over what you said Gx so I broke down and bought a digital scale 500g x 0.1
Now I have 1 less thing to worry about.

Meiji03, a digital scale is one of the best investments that you have ever made. That said, it does seem that they are genuine, except the first one, which I am somewhat doubtful. Now see what I mean when I say that their mass are quite specific? While that might be a power deterrent for counterfeiters, I have seen some super shocker counterfeited coins that even have their diameter, mass and diameter that are exactly the same.

Yes Meiji03, the coin might be a little alarming. Note, in the past, these coins weren't just weighted one by one, but several tens, if not hundreds were weighted at once. For example if 10 coins are weighted at once and if they don't come up to be 270grams, they have to manually check what coin is causing the problem. In Osaka mint, this check is done much more rigriously. Osaka mint is well known for its severe checking. If I wasn't mistaken, gold coins were manually checked and silver was in a batch of hundred in the mint.

Tell me when you can find a serious Japanese error coin - I found them to be very difficult. So far I have only seen three different Japanese error coins, and die cracks are not counted.

There are too many examples that are counterfeits. Even countermarks are counterfeited just to throw people off. I'm sure Swampbob have seen several examples of such.

Strictly speaking, the gin countermark is struck so that it will not be used in Japan. Hence whatever issues that occured with the coin, Osaka mint or the mint in Kanto will not be responsible for whatever that has occured to the coin. Who knows, maybe 0.2 grams was scrapped off during the countermarking process.

Even if the coin did come back as a genuine, few years later down the road, there might be an alarming news that coins graded in a slab are found to be counterfeits. And do note, this is from my experience of super high quality counterfeits that have exactly the same diameter and mass of a genuine coin. Too bad it failed the edge test else it would have fooled many experts easily.

There have been horror news coming out from the Russian numismatics that some of the greatest Imperial Russian commemorative coins slabbed are actually counterfeits, even though they are from the top slabbing companies.

I know - it does hurt to think about owning a counterfeit coin, and I have been through it.

This is my opinion - if it is off by 0.2 grams, something is wrong. Usually when a batch of planchets are made from a sheet of metal and struck, they are weighted straight after it. If they are weighted in batchs of 100 and if they all are 0.2 grams short, it's 20grams instant profit for the mint, which is huge at that period of time.

There was some technical details from the Osaka mint, that is the maximum devination of a gold 5 yen was something like 0.06 grams, 20 yen was 0.03 grams and the silver yen was 0.10grams or something, that is if I did recall right. I read it from somewhere but can't remember what the reference book was.

By 1895, Osaka mint is one of the world's most established mints because of it's ridicious precisions. Perhaps if you did weight more than 100 of these silver yens, you will be able to understand what I mean of this.