Mitsuru Hayama
He has dealt in antique coins for over twenty years — looking at the object, setting a price, tracing where it came from. The school’s course is built from that working eye. He is also a dealer in practice today. For that reason this school issues no authentication, valuation or price opinion on any individual coin. Neither the market nor particular issues are its subject.
About the founder
Handling real coins means deciding what a thing is before deciding what it is worth. Date, mint, provenance, authenticity. Repeat that judgement daily and it becomes clear that a coin is a record of the state, the technology and the belief of its moment, before it is ever a tool of the economy.
This school exists to hand that way of looking on as a liberal education. We do not talk about predicting prices. We lay out 2,700 years of real specimens and read the mechanism of money itself.
Field
- Monetary history (ancient to modern)
- Attribution and provenance of specimens
- Comparison of currency systems
Teaches
Designing and writing the programme. Scripting and supervising the routes.
The founder is a working coin dealer. How that relates to this school is set out, with numbers, on Contact.
Column
Pieces edited out of the school’s own material, to show where the reading is. Every one of them leads back into the material itself.
The Currency and Men Bearing the Name Frank
An inscription meaning 'King of the Franks' became the name of a currency. A great king es
The Fate of Gold, Divided by Its Use
The Toyotomi faction converted the gold and silver left by Hideyoshi into military power,
The Rebellion that Began with an Account Book, and the Cannonballs Paid for with Rights
The rebellion began not with a sword, but with an account book. Under a daimyō said to hav
The Accounts of a Kingdom Facing South and Beyond the Sea
In the second half of the twelfth century, Castile struck gold coins with inscriptions ent
The Value of the Yen as Defined by the 20 Yen Gold Coin
The old 20 yen gold coin was the highest denomination established by the New Coinage Act.
Coinage Struck on Paper, the Promise of Leiden
In besieged Leiden, silver ran out, and coinage was struck from church books. What backed
If you would like to read what he wrote
He designed and wrote every course. The first chapter is open to all.