2 Bu 'Man'en Nibukin'

The Man'en currency reforms of 1860 were a direct response to a monetary crisis triggered by Western traders exploiting the wildly misaligned gold-to-silver ratio in Japan — roughly 1:5 domestically versus 1:15 internationally. Speculators drained the country of gold at an extraordinary rate in the years following the Harris Treaty, forcing the bakufu to drastically reduce the gold content of its coinage. This 2 Bu piece is a product of that emergency, its dramatically debased alloy reflecting how severely the opening of Japan disrupted the Tokugawa monetary system.

Production continued through the fall of the shogunate in 1868, making later strikes technically issues of a government in collapse.