1 Monme Shibamura

Hansatsu — feudal domain currency issued by local authorities, merchants, or temples — were technically illegal under Tokugawa law for most of the Edo period, yet tens of thousands of distinct types circulated freely across Japan because the central government lacked the administrative reach to suppress them. The Shibamura office in Yamato Province (modern Nara Prefecture) was one of countless such local issuers operating in that grey zone.

The monme denomination is a silver-weight unit, meaning this note nominally represented a claim against silver rather than gold or copper cash — a distinction that mattered considerably to rural merchants doing daily exchange. Whether the Shibamura office maintained any real metallic reserve behind it is, as with most hansatsu, unknown.