Read history
People who changed money
You can watch the lives of people who left their mark on the history of money in short films. The video and narration are in Japanese.
8 films
Midas and Gyges
Legend and Usurper
The legend of a king who turned everything he touched into gold, and the usurpation by a man who disappeared with a ring. Two stories become one in a river of gold dust.
Alyattes
The King Who Invented Coinage
A young king who inherited a ravaged country ended a twelve-year war with a solar eclipse and struck the mark of a lion on pellets of metal.
Croesus
The King Who Questioned Happiness
The king who possessed the greatest wealth in the world, asked a sage about happiness, and lost everything. The glory and fall of the man who separated coinage into gold and silver.
Cyrus
The King Who Did Not Destroy
A child raised by a herdsman built an empire, and left the gods and coinage of the conquered lands undestroyed.
Darius
The King Who Engraved the Face of the Empire
A man from a collateral branch of the royal spear-bearers became king, carved on a rock face that he hated lies, and struck his own image drawing a bow on gold coins.
Themistocles
The Man Who Turned Silver into a Fleet
A man from the gymnasium outside the city walls turned a silver strike into two hundred ships instead of distributing it, and stopped an empire in a narrow sea.
Alexander
The King Who Tried to Become a God
A man who became king at twenty and died at thirty-two. The bloody throne, the burned capital, the murder of his benefactor—all as recorded.
Julius Caesar
The Man Whose Role Was to Read the Will of the Gods
A man who bought a divine office with debt, reformed the calendar, and used clemency as a weapon, but could not read his own Ides of March.