Japanese Award boxes

[Ozaki09]

Can anyone please advise if ww2 period award boxes were ever made of a plastic material?

[m4l700]

Hi,

These are indeed made out of some sort of plastic, i'm not sure what type of material it is. Perhaps bakelite?

You mean these?

[Nick Komiya]

No, plastic with gold leaf lettering and spring-loaded hinge is a sure sign of postwar manufacture for lower grade orders. However, higher grade orders continued to come in lacquered wooden boxes.

You must be the one who wanted to know how to date Rising Sun Orders. The case and fonts used on the lid are valuable clues, so getting cased ones help. However, there is no surefire way of dating them based on numismatic properties.

The Japanese system was unique in the sense that you had to return a previous class at the time of receiving the next class. Thus someone being awarded a 2nd class returned his 3rd class to be melted down, but the 3rd class citation remained in his possession.

So when dealers get them from the family, there will be many citations, but only the highest received class of the order would be remaining and the lesser classes will all be orphaned citations only. Dealers will match these orphaned citations up with separately bought orders to create sets, so the dates on the citations too often do not represent the award date of the order.

Normally, different rivet layouts, etc can be tied to certain time-frames when that particular striking die was in use, and this should allow approximate dating, by relating those attributes to the date on the award citations, but because the Japanese system did not allow these links to be preserved, data contamination through newly paired up orders and citations spoiled everything.

There are those who claim to be able to date these orders almost down to the decade, but such people never bother to prove the integrity of the order/citation combination they used to establish chronology, so you need to take their conclusions with a grain of salt.

For Rising Suns, they were initially all made by the Hirata family, but many private firms were later involved in production during the Meiji and Taisho eras giving rise to variations. But the order peddling scandal of the earlier Showa era discontinued privatization of order manufacture and consolidated all Rising Sun production under the national mint from 1932. So even within this turn of events, there would have been a minimum of 3 times a new striking die would have been created for the order. It's clear that variations should exist, but the chronology of early variations are pretty much lost to us.

My grandfather received his Rising Sun Breast Star in Nov. 1965, so my own family can serve as one of the uncontaminated reference points, but for wartime and earlier examples it will be extremely difficult to establish citation and order combinations, as grandfather, father and son may have received the same order, etc.

If you want to know more, read the following


Post #35 and #67 of Story of the Golden Kite
Evolution of the Lapel Badges for the Order of the Rising Sun (1875-1945)

[m4l700]

Interesting information Nick!

Thanks!

[Ozaki09]

Thanks Nick for the valuable information