1 Yen / Ien'

Pick 16 belongs to the short-lived "Taisho" government note series issued directly by the Imperial Treasury rather than the Bank of Japan — an administrative distinction that mattered at the time, as the two issuing authorities circulated notes concurrently and were not always interchangeable in practice. The 1918 date places this note squarely in the inflationary pressure of Japan's post-WWI economic boom, when silver subsidiary coinage was being hoarded and small-denomination paper had to fill the gap.

The Cabinet Printing Bureau had been producing government securities and official documents since the Meiji period, and its intaglio work on this series is notably finer than the lithographic shortcuts taken on some wartime issues that followed decades later.