Shu Gold

The Minbushō was the administrative body responsible for Japan's early Meiji financial apparatus before the more familiar Ōkurashō (Ministry of Finance) consolidated control over currency issuance. These 1869 notes fall within a brief, transitional window when the new government was still improvising its monetary infrastructure, issuing multiple denominations and types in rapid succession as it dismantled the fragmented han currency system inherited from the Tokugawa period.

The "Shu" denomination itself — a unit rooted in Edo-period coinage fractions — was already an anachronism by the time these notes were printed, soon rendered obsolete by the 1871 New Currency Act that established the yen as the decimal standard.