Former Mint Dormitory

The Former Mint Bureau: Where Modern Japanese Coinage Began

In 1871, on the banks of the Okawa River in northern Osaka, the new Meiji government completed a coin factory unlike anything Japan had built before. It followed a Western design, ran on imported machinery, and was staffed at the outset by British and other foreign engineers. The institution was called the Zoheiryo, the Mint Bureau.

The Mint still operates on this site today, but it does so from a later set of buildings. The original Meiji workshops are gone. What remains is a scattering of structures and fixtures from that first decade, and in September 2015 the Agency for Cultural Affairs gathered them into a single designation, recognizing the area as a National Historic Site under the name Former Mint Bureau (Kyu-Zoheiryo).

The protected site is modest in size, roughly 6,650 square meters, and it is split between two areas a short walk apart. One centers on Senpukan, a brick mansion that served as the Mint's reception hall. The other lies inside and beside the working Mint, taking in its old main gate, a guard house, gas lamps, a boundary marker, and a long run of stone embankment along the river.

A Mint Built to Rescue a Currency

Japan in the final years of the 1860s had a currency in disorder. The new government concluded that founding a state-run mint, capable of producing coinage that could stand alongside that of the Western powers, was essential to building a modern nation. The decision to operate such a mint directly was taken in 1868.

Around the same moment, Britain closed the mint it had established in Hong Kong, and the equipment from that operation became available. Through Thomas Glover, the British merchant based in Nagasaki, the government engaged the engineer Thomas James Waters to supervise the design and construction work. In early 1870 a party of seven foreign specialists arrived to install the machinery, led by Thomas William Kinder, who had directed the Hong Kong mint.

Operations began in 1871. The opening ceremony drew senior figures of the new government, including the Minister of the Right, Sanjo Sanetomi, alongside diplomats from several countries. That year the New Currency Act set Japan on the yen, and the striking of gold and silver coins commenced. A copper-coin facility was completed in 1873.

The Mint did far more than press metal. To refine precious metals it produced its own sulfuric acid, and for illumination it generated its own coal gas. The gas lamps lit on the grounds are commonly described as among the first in the country, and some of them survive.

In 1872 the Meiji Emperor visited and lodged in the reception hall. He gave the building its name, Senpukan, joining a classical word for currency with the word for a hall. The institution itself was renamed from Zoheiryo to Zoheikyoku in 1877. The foreign engineers gradually returned home: Kinder's contract ended in 1875, and the last of them, R. Maclagan, departed in 1889, by which time Japanese staff were running the operation on their own.

The first factory buildings did not endure. Built with little resistance to earthquakes, they were replaced in their entirety between 1928 and 1938, after the Great Kanto Earthquake had exposed the danger. No original Meiji workshop stands on the Mint grounds now. That absence is what gives the surviving fragments their weight.

Why the Site Was Designated

National Historic Site status is reserved for places of clear value to the understanding of Japanese history. The Former Mint Bureau was recognized under the category that covers sites of economic and productive activity. The reasoning is direct. The Mint ranked among the earliest full-scale Western-style factories in Japan, and it sat at the center of the young state's effort to place its finances on an international footing.

Two buildings within the designated boundary already carried protection of their own. Senpukan and the relocated entrance of the coinage workshop were both named Important Cultural Properties in 1956. The 2015 Historic Site designation drew a wider line around them, adding the gate, the fittings, and the embankment, so that the physical traces of the early Mint could be safeguarded together as one historical landscape rather than as isolated objects.

What to Look For

Senpukan is the building most visitors come to see. It is a two-story brick structure wrapped on every side by verandas, a layout known as the veranda colonial style, which British engineers carried with them across Asia. It is regarded as the oldest Western-style building still standing in Osaka Prefecture. Waters designed it, and the calm regularity of its proportions reads, even now, as a deliberate statement of the era's ambitions.

The Mint's old main gate, also Waters's work, rewards a slower look. Its gate pillars are cast iron. Beside them stands a small guard house, once a post for sentries: a single-story octagonal building of mortar-coated brick, capped with a pyramidal tiled roof in the form Japanese carpentry calls hogyo-zukuri.

Look, too, for the gas lamps and for the stone embankment that runs along the water. A good deal of the embankment's original stonework is still in place.

One more building completes the story. The stone portico that formed the front entrance of the Mint's gold and silver coinage workshop was preserved when the workshop itself was demolished in 1927. In 1935 the stonework was reassembled as the entrance of a memorial hall, and that building is now known as the former Sakuranomiya Public Hall. Only the entrance portion holds Important Cultural Property status.

Visiting the Site

The two halves of the designated area sit close to the Sakuranomiya Bridge, which carries National Route 1 across the river. Senpukan can be admired from the outside at any time, and its veranda-lined facade is best seen with the river behind it. The interior is opened to the public only on rare, announced occasions, so anyone hoping to step inside should check notices from the City of Osaka in advance.

The neighboring former Sakuranomiya Public Hall now operates as a restaurant and event venue. Booking its lunch service is one of the more reliable ways to spend time inside a building bound up with the Mint's history.

The working Mint, for its part, runs free guided factory tours by advance reservation and keeps a museum open to the public at no charge. The Mint Museum occupies a brick building dating from 1911, once a power plant, and the only brick structure of the Meiji era left on the grounds. Its collection traces the history of coinage in Japan, with rare gold and silver pieces among the displays. The museum closes during the cherry-blossom week each spring.

Around the Mint

The Mint is most widely known for something that has little to do with coins. For about one week in mid-April, a path of roughly 560 meters through the grounds opens to the public as the Torinuke, the "passage." Some 130 varieties of cherry grow along it, many of them late-blooming kinds rarely seen elsewhere, and lanterns light the path after dark. Entry is free but requires an advance reservation, and the factory tours and museum pause for the duration.

Along the river, the Kema-Sakuranomiya Park follows the water for several kilometers, an easy and pleasant walk in any season. The wider district around the Mint, from the Tenmangu shrine to the bridges of the old canal town, carries its own layers of Osaka history and makes the site a natural stop on a longer day out.