IN THE EARLY 1960s, Japanese citizens found themselves looking askance at the thousand-yen notes that, thanks to a resurgent economy, were increasingly abundant in their lives. The cause of their wariness was the Chi-37 forgery scandal, in which virtually undetectable counterfeit thousand-yen notes circulated throughout the country, identifiable only through ever-lengthening lists of suspect serial numbers printed in the papers—and prompting the government in 1963 to commence the bills’ replacement with a new, “C series” note.

Then, on January 27, 1964, the newspaper Asahi Shinbun broke the