1964 Silver ¥1000 Commemorative Tokyo Olympics Coin

avatar
(Edited)

Hello Silver & Gold stackers! Another week and I have another Japanese coin for you! This one is a doozie. This time we'll be looking at a silver ¥1000 coin that was made for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. I'll give some info about the coin, then we'll look at both sides, and then some info on the sen in general.

Sound fun? Let's go!

Stats

Some basic coin stats for you:

20g
35mm diameter
2.5mm thickness
edge: reeded

and most importantly, it's 92.5% silver, so that means about 18.5 grams of silver.

Front side

The front side has Mount Fuji with cherry blossoms around it.

Above it reads "Japan" or "State of Japan" (日本国).

Below it reads "One thousand yen" (千円).

Back side

The back side features that big "1000 yen" in the middle and the Olympic rings.

Again we have some cherry blossoms to right and left.

Above we have "1964 Tokyo".

and below we have the same date just in the Japanese style: Shōwa 39.

About

15 million of these were produced for the Olympics, along with ¥100 version which I covered here. The 1964 Olympics were a big deal for the country. It was in many ways Japan's reintroduction to the world. They were no longer a militant nation on the path of warfare, nor a destroyed nation, but now were a peaceful country, rebuilt and open to doing business with the world. They would use the games to show off a bunch of high technology that they had been developing, such as the bullet train.

The coin was intended for circulation, and evidently a few of them were used, but collectors gobbled them up within the first year. This and the ¥100 version were the first commemorative coins Japan produced. They have continued making commemorative ¥1000 coins nearly every year since.

Let's look at some more shots. For all my camera lenses I don't own a macro lens, so I'm using my smartphone. They came out pretty well all things considered.

Here it is with that 20 sen coin laying on top. Not much of a contest between them!

And here it is laying on top of a Morgan dollar. A little more equality between these two.

Overall

Another beautiful Japanese coin! I kind of like this design less that the 20 Sen Piece I shared last week, but it still is quite nice. The drawing of the mountain and the cherry blossoms is nice. Too bad the other side is just meh.

NGC lists a melt value is around $14 and a half and the coin value is around $20. Well, that's for extra fine. As you can tell from the photos, I don't think this is XF. Lots of scratches and a few gunky parts. Maybe I can clean off that gunk without scratching it more, not sure. Any suggestions?

Anyway, I have a few more coins on order from around Japan. None have arrived yet but hopefully at least one gets here by next week so I can do another post in a week.

Hi there! 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.


0
0
0.000
33 comments
avatar

Nice pick up! I don't believe I have any Japanese coins in the collection, I'll have to make a point to work on that.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Thanks! Japanese coins are pretty nice, so hope you can get some.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Nice coin and very useful and informative description.
Thank you for sharing!

0
0
0.000
avatar

What can be more iconic symbols of Japan than the 'Sakura' Cherry blossoms and Mt. Fuji, other that Imperial Chrysanthemum. A lovely silver coin commemorating the Tokyo Olympics.
Thanks for sharing.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

0
0
0.000
avatar

Damn, that 1000 Yen is so sweet. I need to spend more time looking at Japanese coins. Thanks for sharing.
!PIMP

0
0
0.000
avatar

You should. There are some really nice ones. Thanks for reading 😃

!PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

So rare!

0
0
0.000
avatar

It's not so rare I think. There were 15 million of them after all so they are easy enough to find and I see them at dealers all the time. But the price of it is ever going up due to the high silver content. I paid ¥3000 for this and I think it will just keep going up.

0
0
0.000
avatar

I see, I haven't been to dealers I guess (I'm not so exposed in that area). 3k yen is kinda reasonable "for now". It's a collector's item.

0
0
0.000
avatar

It is fun to understand this coin has an element of the history in Japan. The openness of the country toward the global world.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Glad you enjoyed. Yeah, there is a nice background to this coin.

!PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

A very cool piece and they are hard to come by. Congrats

0
0
0.000
avatar
(Edited)

PIZZA!

$PIZZA slices delivered:
dbooster tipped cryptosnowball
dbooster tipped kerrislravenhill
dbooster tipped silverd510
dbooster tipped summertooth
@dbooster(5/15) tipped @pocketechange

0
0
0.000
avatar

That's super cool. I like the mountain on the one side. What a great memento from the games. I like it when they do special run stuff like this to commemorate special occasions.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Yeah it's pretty cool that they went all out for the games.

0
0
0.000
avatar

This post has been manually curated by @bhattg from Indiaunited community. Join us on our Discord Server.

Do you know that you can earn a passive income by delegating your Leo power to @india-leo account? We share 100 % of the curation rewards with the delegators.

100% of the rewards from this comment goes to the curator for their manual curation efforts. Please encourage the curator @bhattg by upvoting this comment and support the community by voting the posts made by @indiaunited.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Usually, in Japan they try to make everything miniature, but this coin is huge! :)

0
0
0.000
avatar

haha I suppose so. I don't know where the miniature idea comes from, actually. Cars are smaller here, but everything else is pretty much normal size. Coins included 😃

0
0
0.000
avatar

What about most apartments? :)

0
0
0.000
avatar

Good point, but I don't really find apartments all that much smaller than the rest of the world. They can be in big places like Tokyo, but that would be the same as NYC where they are also small and expensive. I've seen some videos of tiny apartments in China that make even capsule hotels in Japan look huge.

0
0
0.000
avatar

The mountain on the side seem to be cool
Nice one!!!

0
0
0.000
avatar

Yeah it is pretty nice. Thanks for reading!

0
0
0.000