500 Yen - Heisei Hiroshima

Issued as part of Japan's 47 Prefectures Coin Program, a series launched in 2008 to produce two commemorative 500-yen coins for each prefecture over roughly two decades. Hiroshima's second issue appeared in 2013. The program was itself a response to declining public interest in domestic commemorative coinage — the Mint needed a long-running, regionally specific series to sustain collector engagement across Japan's entire administrative geography.

The bimetallic format incorporates latent image and micro-lettering security features added to the 500-yen specification in 2000, following a well-documented counterfeiting problem with the earlier clad version.