Usually when we hear of coin hoards being dug up in England, they’re Roman or Saxon or medieval. It seems like people in the UK stumble on ancient buried treasure every other day. Dozens of gold coins minted in the US in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, however, are not so regularly found. In fact, until a couple of fellas decided to do some gardening in their east London back yard, such a find was unprecendented.

The details of the discovery are being kept quiet for now, both to prevent lookie loos and to ensure there are no false ownership claims. What we do know is that two people found a hoard of 80 gold Double Eagle $20 pieces, dating from between 1854 and 1913, in a Hackney garden. Double Eagles are made from 90% gold — 0.9675 troy ounces if it — and 10% copper alloy. The coins come from all over the country, minted in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Denver and Carson City, among other cities.

They were worth $20 because that was the fixed value of an ounce of gold in 1849 (yes, the year of the California Gold Rush) when they were first minted. That would be a value of $521.28 in modern buying power, all in one heavy gold coin, and that’s not counting the fluctuating value of the gold itself. Some designs, years and mints are more valuable than others, but there’s little doubt the value of the entire collection will probably reach the six figures.

The Hackney coins start just 5 years after the first Double Eagle was struck, although the bulk of the hoard comes from the later years. According to Dr Barrie Cook of the British Museum’s Department of Coins and Medal:

“The catalogue shows that the coins gradually increase in number across the decades from 1870 to 1909 (13 coins from 1870-9; 14 from 1880-89; 18 from 1890-99; and 25 from 1900-9).

“Over a quarter of the total were issued in the last 6 six years represented. Together these factors suggest that the material began to be put aside during this later period, rather than being built up systematically across a range of time represented.

“The main element among this latest material are the 17 coins dating to 1908, which suggests that a single batch of coins from that year might have formed the core for the group.”

That means the burier might actually be alive. It’s unlikely, but certainly possible, and his heirs could very well be around to file an ownership claim. The details of the location which have not been released will be used to screen out potential Double Eagle Anastasias.

The finders have reported the coin hoard to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and an inquest has been opened. Any claimants have until February 8 to come forward. If nobody does claim ownership and the coroner determines that it’s officially treasure (which he will because buried gold is pretty much the Platonic form of official treasure), then the Crown becomes the official owner, fair market value will be assessed, and the finders paid in that amount by whichever institution wants the hoard.

Hackney Museum has already raised its hand. Meanwhile, the coins will go on display at the British Museum starting tomorrow.

Despite Japan’s alliance with Germany, Japanese officials collaborated to save thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe. The best known instance of a Japanese government employee defying Japanese immigration strictures to save Jews is Chiune Sugihara, an diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Lithuania who handed out travel visas to thousands of Jews in the early days of the war, even throwing blank visas out the window of his train as he left in August 1940 when the Russians annexed Lithuania.

Sugihara has been referred to as the “Japanese Schindler” because his transit visas allowed an estimated 6000 Jews to flee the country via the Trans-Siberian railway to Japanese-occupied Manchuria. He was honored in 1985 by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Once Jewish refugees got to Japanese territory, however, there was a whole other bureaucratic mountain to climb. They were stateless, often penniless and dumped in Manchuria. The Japan Tourist Bureau, apparently with the permission of Foreign Ministry, agreed to help distribute aid money sent by Jews in the US to Jewish refugees in Japan. This infusion of funds covered the immigration requirements that Sugihara had so consistently not given a crap about, and gave the refugees the means to get by and make plans.

Tatsuo Osako was a Tourist Bureau employee assigned to act as an escort on ships carrying refugees across the Sea of Japan to port cities like Kobe and Yokohama where they could arrange for further transport. Osako kept pictures of some of the people he helped in a diary which was found in a drawer after his death in 2003. He didn’t write in the diary much, sadly, so all we know about who these people were is from their faces and the kind comments they wrote to Osako on the pictures.

“My best regards to my friend Tatsuo Osako,” is scrawled in French on the back of the picture, which is signed “I. Segaloff” and dated March 4, 1941. His fate is unknown.

An effort is under way to find the people in these portraits or their descendants, all of whom are assumed to be Jewish. Personal photos of such refugees, who often fled with few possessions, are rare. […]

Akira Kitade, who worked under Osako and is researching a book about him, has contacted Israeli officials for help and visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The museum said he gave it about 30 photographs that he is trying to identify, and received a list of over 2,000 Jews who received travel papers that enabled them to reach Japan.

The Israeli ambassador to Japan, Nissim Ben Shitrit, is optimistic that they will be able to locate some of the people in the pictures and/or their descendants.

The comments on the pictures are written in languages (German, Polish, French) that mirror Germany’s conquest of Europe. Osako himself was so circumspect about his war experience that not even his daughters knew about the people he helped save. All we have in his words are a few lines he wrote in 1995 for a college alumni publication.

“The Jews that I saw at that time had no passports and were stateless, they were refugees that had fled Europe and were generally downcast, some with vacant eyes that projected the loneliness of people in exile,” Osako wrote.

But he also had time to make friends along the way — he notes that some were very helpful in his duties, and he recalls seeing Jewish women “of a rarely seen beauty.”