10 Sen

The Bank of Chōsen — Japan's colonial central bank for Korea — issued this 10 Sen note as a direct response to a wartime copper shortage that had stripped small-denomination metallic coinage from everyday commerce. The fractional paper series it belongs to was itself a stopgap measure, widely resented in Korea precisely because it symbolized the extraction of metal resources for the Japanese war effort in the 1910s.

By 1919, the political temperature in Korea had reached a breaking point. The March 1st Movement erupted that year — the largest organized resistance to Japanese colonial rule — and notes like this one circulated through markets and hands in the immediate aftermath of those uprisings.