mission.japan

I seem to remember a Megatokyo strip in which Largo said something about the money in Japan having holes in it, so he didn’t think it was real. I thought it was in the early days of the comic, but I didn’t find it skimming through the first chapter. Anyway, the money in Japan does in fact have holes in it—well, some of it.

The WikiPedia page on the Japanese Yen has a plethora of information on the established currency over here. Unlike America, practically all purchases in Japan are made with cash (not credit cards or checks). Also unlike America, the yen’s denominations are a bit different than the dollar’s. Yen (one yen is more or less equal to a penny, by the way) comes in metallic form in 1-, 5-, 10-, 50-, 100-, and 500-yen versions. (The 5- and 50-yen coins have holes in the middle.) Foldable yen is available in three forms: 1000-, 5000-, and 10000-yen bills.

Coin management is a daily sort of thing in Japan. If you’re lazy and pay for everything with paper, you’ll quickly end up with piles of coinage of all varieties—kipple in monetary format, essentially. One way to fight it is to always carry around a selection of coins and try to account for as many digits as possible on the right-hand side of your purchase totals. (Another method is vending machines, which are both ubquitous and deserving of their own entry—but the machines don’t take anything smaller than 10 yen.)

Perhaps surprisingly the new money requires a bit of adjustment time (although maybe the experience of others differs with mine). American monetary math rotates around the quarter, the 25-cent champion of U.S. coinage. Japan essentially uses a double quarter (the 50-yen coin) and follows that up with what are for all intents and purposes a dollar and five dollars packed into a coin (the 100-yen and 500-yen coins). So counting and adding can be slow for the first couple of weeks in Japan as your mind gets accustomed to the new denominations.