100 Yen in Gold

The Bank of Chosen was established in 1909, the year before Japan formally annexed Korea, and its notes were designed to displace existing Daiichi Bank issues that had circulated on the peninsula since the 1880s. This 100 Yen denomination sat at the high end of everyday commercial use and would have moved primarily through wholesale trade and official transactions rather than retail channels.

The "in Gold" inscription is the critical detail. It designated convertibility into gold coin under the gold standard Japan had adopted in 1897 — a deliberate signal of monetary credibility to Japanese merchants and foreign trading houses operating in Korea. That convertibility clause became a fiction almost immediately after World War One disrupted gold flows globally.