3 Fun Kawachi Province

Kawachi Province's Exchange Office (Kawachi Kokusan-hin Kaisho) was one of dozens of regional commodity exchange bureaus that proliferated under the Tokugawa administration, typically chartered to facilitate local product trade rather than to function as conventional banking institutions. These offices issued scrip denominated in *fun* — a fractional unit rarely seen in surviving Japanese feudal paper — as a practical workaround for the chronic shortage of small copper coinage that plagued provincial commerce throughout the early eighteenth century.

The extremely narrow format was not unusual for *hansatsu*-type scrip of this period; the proportions made forgery by cutting down larger notes more difficult to disguise.