NEW BOOK: ATTRIBUTION OF THE TENPO TSUHO

"I believe I found about you through a link in a post on Numista. There I am known as fairfield.

"My interest is in Japanese numismatics. Been collecting since 1980 when I met my wife who is raised in the Kansai area of Japan. Started doing amateur research in 2007 upon retirement.

"My first work was on using density as a more reliable attribution guide for the Japanese 4 mon namisen in place of the conventional assignment based on coin color. The density work was supported by independent qualitative chemical analysis by XRF. This work was posted on the Numista web site.

"For the last five years I have been translating four Japanese texts on the Tenpo Tsuho coin that, as a set, are distributed evenly in time and represent the state of knowledge over a period of more than 60 years. As the existing texts on Japanese coins only show rubbing images of a limited number of varieties (or in the case of more recent JNDA catalogs images of only the obverse face), I published a small book through Amazon that gives obverse and reverse (and part of the edge too) images of actual coins and attribution guidance on the 20 most common Tenpo Tsuho encountered by the collector."

A GUIDE TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF THE MORE COMMON TENPO TSUHO
Paperback –
March 18, 2026

ATTRIBUTION OF THE MORE COMMON TENPO TSUHO book cover

The Tenpo Tsuho sen was the largest of the copper cash coinage in circulation within Japan during the Edo period when the country was ruled by the Tokugawa Shogunate. In addition to official issues, the Tenpo Tsuho was produced by a number of feudal domains without permission from the government, and these illegal coins circulated side by side with the legitimate coinage. Today the coins are sought after by collectors, but attribution to specific casting entities is difficult without access to references written in Japanese. This book aims to fill that gap by providing detailed guidance for twenty of the most commonly encountered Tenpo Tsuho. Rubbing images found in former texts are now replaced with full color images of actual coins, with distinctive features marked in sufficient detail to provide guidance to the interested Tenpo Tsuho collector.

The main basis for this attribution guide is a comparison of roughly 60 Tenpo Tsuho with rubbings found in four Japanese Tenpo Tsuho texts spanning 60 years. Over this time period many assignments have been adjusted to accommodate new numismatic information; and, to be fair, it is clear there is still much disagreement among experts on the correct attribution of many Tenpo Tsuho variants. Where this is the case, we present all relevant information found for each example coin. Because of our focus on the common coins, the really rare varieties (e.g. from casting sites in Sendai and Fukuoka) are not included.