the color of money [2007.09.19]

I wanted to talk a little about the makeup and value of the Japanese yen.  I went to Hiroshima this past weekend and while I was there it got me to thinking about money and perspective a little.  The Hiroshima lowdown will probably extend over the course of a few letters, but since I am currently in the full-on throes of a meeting, the likes of which I am both incapable of understanding or contributing too, I decided to write something a little shorter.  This may be completely uninteresting to you, and if so, I apologize.

Like Europe, Japan makes extensive use of coins for its currency.  There are 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500 yen coin denominations, with the 500 yen coin being the coin with the highest value minted in the world.  After that there are 1000, 2000, 5000, and 10000 notes.  There are probably other notes as well, but I will never see them.  Actually most Japanese people never see 2000 yen notes either, and the possession of one immediately marks you as a freshly-arrived foreigner.  They are kind of treated like $2 bills in the US.

In Japanese counting, they have the standard hundred and thousand business but then ten thousand has it's own special counter, the "man" (with a short "a" like "Vietnam" and not like in "mankind").  



Counting in in ten thousands is a really awkward concept at first and seems very strange until you get accustomed to how much an amount of yen is worth.  Yesterday it was maybe 115yen to the US$, making one man worth about $85 or so (sorry to my international comrades).  One man is a convenient breaking point; when stuff starts costing more than a man then it's getting serious.

I've also noticed that most (foreign) people that have been here for a while will use Japanese numbers for discussing costs (so "ni man san zen en" for 23,000 yen), even if the rest of the conversation is in English, which is an interesting phenomenon.

I think that I have pretty much adjusted to the value of the yen here in Japan and have stopped relating it (inaccurately) to the (us) dollar.  I just wish the yen would get a lot stronger over the dollar for when I send money home for those college loans...

monetarily-minded "futures" love,

-greg.