A special 500 yen coin will be issued next March to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of Japanese emigration to Brazil in 1908, the Finance Ministry said Tuesday.

The coin will be identical to normal 500 yen coins in terms of materials but will depict a Japanese family of three emigrants on one side and a design of cherry blossoms and coffee beans on the reverse, the ministry said.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20070418a5.html

Nice idea, and probably not a very expensive piece.

What I also found interesting in that article is the second coin mentioned. Not because of the occasion ("International Skills Festival for All" does not sound terribly exciting to me ) but because of this: "It said 80,000 of the coins would be issued, even though the cost of making them will exceed the face value."

Christian

Sounds wrong in my opinion.

While it is important to commemorate such events, Brazilians or even Brazilian Japanese face ridicious discrimination in Japan. I would suspect that hidden backlash would occur but let's hope that it wouldn't happen.

Perhaps this idea of such coin is bluntly copied off from the Australia-Japan relationship minted just last year: http://www.mint.go.jp/eng/coin/internation...set/page19.html
I wasn't too thrilled over that coin either even though I have relationship with both countries.

Interestingly, this will be the first time that Japanese coins would have a foreign language other than English.

I would be more than sure that the coins will be sold out extremely fast like all Japanese coins other than mint sets have done so in the past.

There was not as much migration to Brazil as there was to the USA and Canada beginning in the 1880's, many of these people were farmers, and today some of the best farms on the West Coast of the USA are owned by Americans of Japanese ancestry. Worthy of at least a commemorative here in the USA as they contributed greatly to the economy here, and in WWII they fought valiantly in the 442nd regiment, the most decorated regiment in the USA army:

Fighting 442nd

These people fought for their country despite the fact that their country kept their families at home in "internment camps"

Hm. "Today, the nikkei in Brazil constitute the largest group of overseas ethnic Japanese in the world". http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/latin/brazil/speech0505.html Sounds like quite a lot to me.

Christian

Interesting, I knew that they did immigrate there, but not so many. One of the former Presidents of Peru is Japanese, Alberto Fujimori, but he lives in Japan now, because like with what happens with many Latin American leaders he fell out of favour, and had to leave the country.

On a similar vain, a lot of Americans went to Brazil and still have a colony there up in the north of the country, they left the USA right after the conclusion of the Civil War, refugees from a vanquished Confederacy. Something that is not well documented now but did happen is that lots of families in the Southern States were uprooted and left for greener pastures, usually the West Coast of the USA, but also Brazil, Europe etc.

There are a great many Japanese in Recife that I can say for sure any info on where the US enclave is/was?

The very same coin is under the cane at the moment:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i0JbXR...G2wIfiS9rhDUhqg

Strange. Of course it makes sense to find out about such issues before designing a coin. Then again, if that migrants association told the Japanese government that copyright wise it would be OK to use the monument, why should that be doubted? Ah, back to the drawing board - and actually with a ship on a coin they cannot go terribly wrong ...

Christian