1 Bu Minbushō-satsu

The Minbushō-satsu were among the first government-issued paper notes of the Meiji period, produced under the short-lived Ministry of Popular Affairs before it was absorbed into the Ōkurashō (Finance Ministry) in 1870. That administrative merger effectively ended the series, which gives these notes an unusually narrow issuance window of under two years.

The extreme elongation of the format follows a deliberate borrowing from traditional Japanese printed formats — hansatsu domain notes had conditioned the public to vertical, narrow paper currency for generations. Meiji reformers were modernizing the currency system but not yet willing to break entirely from familiar physical conventions.