500 Yen - Heisei Nagasaki

This piece belongs to Japan's 47 Prefectures Coin Program, a long-running commemorative series launched in 2008 in which each of Japan's prefectures received a dedicated 500 yen issue — two per year, in pairs, until the series concluded. Nagasaki Prefecture's selection for this issue reflects its distinctive historical position as Japan's sole sanctioned gateway for foreign trade during the Sakoku period, when the artificial island of Dejima hosted Dutch and Chinese merchants under strict shogunal supervision.

The bimetallic format used throughout the series incorporates latent image technology and a clad ring construction specifically developed to defeat the sophisticated counterfeiting that had plagued the previous generation of 500 yen coins in the early 2000s.