Mint Museum

This guide to the Mint Museum in Osaka opens in 1871, when Japan's new currency mint asked entering workers to give up something more than a day's routine: their swords. Under British director Thomas Kinder, samurai employees faced blunt new rules to cut the topknot, wear a Western suit, and hand over the blade, as the Meiji government traded hand-cast coins for machine-struck currency. The pair of gas lamps flanking the entrance gate are said to be the oldest in Japan, first lit the same year the mint opened.