50 Sen

The Bank of Chōsen (朝鮮銀行) functioned as the central bank for colonial Korea and also held currency-issuing authority in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and parts of northern China — an unusually wide operational remit for what was nominally a colonial institution. By 1937, the year Japan launched full-scale war in China, the Printing Bureau in Tokyo was managing an expanding currency portfolio across multiple occupied territories, and small-denomination fractional notes like this one absorbed much of the pressure from coin metal shortages that accelerated through the late 1930s.

The sen series generally circulated hard. Low denominations passed through many hands in daily retail transactions and surviving examples with decent paper integrity are proportionally uncommon given the print runs.