Sometimes, as a grader, I get a coin that leaves me flabbergasted. This was the case in August when in a submission to the PCGS office in Hong Kong came a United States Liberty Seated Half Dollar sent in Economy tier by someone who potentially didn’t know what they had. In reality, most people wouldn’t know this particular issue as anything special – it is extremely rare and obscure. Yet, it is an incredible piece of history.
In 1858, the Harris Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed following Commodore Matthew Perry getting United States entrance into Japan. Signed in the city of Edo (today Tokyo) on July 29, 1858, the treaty opened up five ports of trade with the United States in Japan. In the treaty, in accordance with Article V, “Americans and Japanese may freely use foreign coins in making payments to each other,” and “All foreign coins shall be current in Japan, and pass for its corresponding weight of Japanese coin of the same description.”
Among these ports that opened for trade was the Port of Hakodate. To accommodate the treaty, each foreign coin was weighed and stamped with the corresponding characters to the coin’s current weight. While the stamped pieces are very rare today, they are known to exist with coins from Russia, France, Mexico, and the United States. The port of Hakodate abandoned the practice as they found the weighing, calculating, and stamping of each coin impractical.
The coin that was submitted to the PCGS office in Hong Kong was one such United States half dollar that had been struck at the San Francisco Mint in 1858; it found transport onto a ship that would dock at the Hakodate Port in Japan the same year sometime after August. The coin was spent in Japan and stamped at the port with the new Japanese denomination of 3.32 momme. Prior to this coin being submitted to PCGS, there had been five other United States half dollars that had been documented as being stamped at the Japanese Port of Hakodate.
This coin had obviously not seen commerce after stamping and was well preserved. The coin was graded MS63 by PCGS. While the Economy tier has a value limit of only $300, this coin in the proper auction could easily exceed $10,000. (It should be noted for clarity of our submission protocol that the submission tier under which this coin was billed was adjusted to properly reflect the correct valuation!)