There are micro characters incised on new 500-yen coins!
It's famous that various high technologies to prevent dud coins are adopted in minting new 500-yen coins. Perhaps many of the Japanese have tried seeing latent image of "500Yen" that comes up with a specific angle of view. But I'm sure that there are not so many people who know the existence of micro characters on the coin.
A 500-yen coin, which is 26.5 mm in diameter, has micro characters on its surface. Each character is only 180-micro-meters-square in size. (180 micro meters = 0.18mm) How small is it ? If you fill the coin with the character, you can write in about 17,000 characters on a side of the coin. And it's too hard (some say possible with guts) to see the characters with naked eyes.
An enlarged image of the coin for gutless is below. The characters are incised inside the red frames. Following them in order, we'll find "NIPPON" (i.e. Japan in Japanese).
Images below are enlarged regions inside the red frames above.
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| 'N' is on the corner. |
'I' alike. |
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| Each character of 'P - P' is at the end of the foot line. | Each character of 'O - N' is at the end of the foot line. |
These characters are placed on the foot of "mountains" avoiding to be scratched away.
Micro characters are also on the other side of the coin.
"NIPPON" is also incised in the other side of the coin.
Images below are enlarged regions inside the red frames above.
Negative image to see more easily is below. Characters are placed along a shaft and a petal.
The Mint Bureau keeps quiet.
Despite this unbelievable art of minting worth being proud of, The Mint Bureau gives no information about the micro characters in its web page.
Four points of anti-counterfeiting measures introduced in the web page are,
1. Latent Image
2. Helical Ridges
3. Micro Dots & Micro Stripes
4. Alloy of Rare Composition
But no information on micro characters.
It might be a top secret.
Then, I must be eliminated... Oh, heeellllp!!
