10 Yen

Japan's postwar monetary disorder reached a peak in 1946 with the Emergency Financial Measures Ordinance of February that year, which froze existing bank deposits and mandated exchange of all old-series notes for new issues — this 10 Yen being among the replacement currency authorized under that scheme. The ordinance was designed to suppress wartime inflation by effectively wiping out liquid savings held in cash, a brutal measure that hit ordinary households far harder than the financial institutions it nominally targeted.

The print run of just over 12 million is modest by occupation-era standards, and the series was short-lived — superseded within a few years as the postwar reform issues stabilized.