The National Banks in Meiji Japan were a system of organization of the Japanese banking system created in the 1870s, shortly after the Meiji Restoration and inspired by the U.S. National Bank Act of the previous decade.
Under the system, national banks were individually chartered by the government as banks of issue whose banknotes were all accepted as legal tender. Starting with Dai-Ichi National Bank in 1873, around 150 national banks were thus created, most of which morphed into still-extant Japanese banks via multiple mergers and restructurings. The national banking system itself, however, was short-lived. It was superseded by the newly created Bank of Japan, inspired by European models and established in the early 1880s, and fully phased out in the late 1890s.