200 mon ND

Wooden currency is extraordinarily rare in Japanese monetary history, and these 200 mon pieces were emergency issues produced during the late Edo period when copper shortages made conventional casting impossible for certain domains. Individual han governments occasionally authorized substitute materials — wood among them — when bullion supplies collapsed under the financial strain of maintaining domain infrastructure and samurai stipends.

Survivorship is poor. Wood degrades, and most circulated examples were simply discarded once copper supplies stabilized and the issuing domain withdrew them.