Banknote and Postage Stamp Museum

A must-visit for philatelists and anyone interested in the finer details of paper money, this free-entry museum in Kita-ku’s Oji explains the printing process for both stamps and notes, enlightens visitors on the history of Japanese money, reveals the Bank of Japan’s anti-counterfeiting measures and displays historical notes from as far back as the Edo era. The exhibits also include a cool ‘stamps of the world’ section and a few eye-popping foreign bills, including ones from Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe with more zeroes than you’ll care to count. Although most of the display explanations are in Japanese, non-readers will probably still find most of the stuff here interesting.