20 Sen

Dai-Ichi Ginko — the First National Bank of Japan — had a peculiar extraterritorial role in Korea from the 1870s onward, effectively functioning as the de facto central bank of the Joseon kingdom and later the Korean Empire before any formal annexation occurred. This 20 Sen note, issued in 1904, belongs to a series that circulated primarily on the Korean peninsula rather than in Japan proper, used to finance Japanese commercial activity and, increasingly, military logistics during the Russo-Japanese War, which broke out in February of that year.

Dai-Ichi's Korean note issues were eventually absorbed into the new Bank of Korea system in 1909, making this series short-lived by design.