Asian Year Calculator

Identifying the years on Asian coins can be quite difficult, if not painstaking at times. This page hopefully helps you to read a bit of Asian characters as well as helping you calculate what the exact years of the coins that you have there.

Any questions or problems mail me at:

This page so far only covers Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese years.

• Reading Characters
• Japan
• Korea
• Taiwan, Republic of China

Characters

In all of the Northern Asian countries, they follow a generic way of naming their era:

(era's name) (year of ruling)

Most of the older text are to be read from right to left, not left to right like how this text is supposed to be read.

For example, this is 1 sen from Japan. The correct way to read it is,

In general, if you see the character , this notifies you that it is the end of the line and hence you should be reading it the other way around if it begins from the start of the line.  Eras ALWAYS start from the beginning, followed by the number of years and then the character .

Table for reading Chinese numeric characters in both new and old format:

Japan year

(Meiji, Taisho, Showa, Heisei)

More information about the era can be found here: Wikipedia

More illustration can be seen here: Personal Japanese coin type set