Kan'ei Tsūhō
former currency in Japan
The Kan'ei Tsūhō (Kyūjitai: 寛永通寳; Shinjitai: 寛永通宝) was a Japanese mon coin in use from 1626 until 1868 during the Edo period. In 1636, the Kan'ei Tsūhō coin was introduced by the Tokugawa shogunate to standardise and maintain a sufficient supply of copper coinage, and it was the first government-minted copper coin in 700 years. The government adopted the coin after its successful introduction in the Mito domain ten years prior in 1626, the third year of the Kan'ei era. These coins would become the daily currency of the common people and would be used for small payments.
Due to the isolationist policies of the Tokugawa shogunate, the outflow of currency halted and Kan'ei Tsūhō coins would continue to stay the main coin circulating in Japan. Kan'ei Tsūhō were minted for 230 years despite the fact that the Kan'ei era ended in 1643. Kan'ei Tsūhō coins would continue to bear the Kan'ei legend, even when a new denomination of the coin was introduced a century later. They were not all uniform as the shogunate had intended, as the mintage was outsourced to regional and local merchants who would cast them at varying weights and sizes, as well as occasionally with local mint marks. By the 1650s, 16 private mints were operating for the production of Kan'ei Tsūhō coins all over Japan. In 1738, the government authorised the manufacture of iron Kan'ei Tsūhō 1 mon coins, and in 1866 (just before the end of the Edo period) iron 4 mon Kan'ei Tsūhō were authorised.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kan'ei Tsūhō” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.