Japanese Hansatsu

Catalogue of Japanese hansatsu (藩札 / 古札)—Edo- and early-Meiji-period paper money issued by the feudal domains, prefectures, exchange companies and bannermen. This database is admittedly less rich and accurate than our others, due to a lack of good source material and a heavy reliance on machine translation from Japanese to English. As such, entries can be a bit messy and inconsistent, but should still serve to get collectors on the right track. All machine transcribed entries also have a confidence rating, which indicates how reliable the transcription is.

The database draws from three sources: University of Tokyo Library of Economics “Database of Historical Coins and Historical Bills” (Yasuda Zenjirō collection), the British Museum’s hansatsu holdings, and 藩札図録 (Sano Eizan, 1921), one of the definitive Japanese works on hansatsu. Hepburn romanization and English glosses have been added so records are searchable in either script. Items are organized by domain (han), province, note type and denomination.

Two aids also help with the Japanese script: a handwriting pad displayed at the bottom right corner of your screen, and fuzzy character matching in our advanced search (work in progress), which still finds a note when you enter a visually-similar but different character (e.g. katakana カ for the kanji 力, or 士 for 土).