Japanese Yen

When in a foreign country, even looking through your spare change can be new and exciting!

The currency of Japan is the yen. In Japan it is represented by the Kanji 円, and abroad by the symbol ¥.

If you use the USD, it shouldn't be hard for you to make sense of the value of your yen. It takes 100 yen to make a dollar, so just think of each yen as a single cent. I found it helpful to mentally add a decimal point to values.


For example,

200 yen - 2.00 dollars - 2 dollars.
10000 yen - 100.00 dollars - 100 dollars.

The Japanese use coins more than Americans do, so you may have to get used to the idea that a pocketful of change might actually be worth something!

The biggest Japanese coin, and yes, it's very commonly used, is the 500¥ coin. It's big, heavy, gold coloured, and worth a little over 5$! As the highest valued regularly used coin in the world, I daresay it's worth picking up if you should drop one.

The smallest coin is the 1¥ coin. It is tiny and made of 100% aluminum, so it's incredibly lightweight and almost feel like play money.

Another thing to notice is that two of the coins - the 5¥ and 50¥ pieces, have holes in them. The 5¥ coin is particularly notable. While only worth five cents, it is mostly copper and quite lovely. Unlike every other Japanese coin, it lacks any roman numerals. It is also considered to have a special value because the Japanese words for "Five Yen" - "Go-En" are the same as the honorific word for "Fate". Therefore, the 5¥ coin is very commonly given as a donation in Shinto shrines.


All pictures taken from Wikipedia.