Posted by Jess
5 March 2011

Today marks the 7 month anniversary of our Japan adventure.  Time is surely flying now!  So much left to do in such a short amount of time.

For this month I thought I would share some information about money and purchasing power in Japan.  The Japanese currency is the Yen.  The word Yen means 'round object' in Japanese.  The yen was officially adopted in 1871.  Prior to that, Spanish silver dollar coins had made their way to Asia from Mexico and those were used for trading. 


Yen coins come in a range of 1 to 500 and notes from 1,000-10,000.  With the current exchange rate, 1,000 Yen is about equal to $12.  The symbol for Yen is ¥, like a dollar is $.

I was going to take pictures of the coins and notes to post, but Wikipedia does it better.  So here are pictures of the coins (1, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500)



Notes were harder to find pictures of, so Jason took pictures of what we have around the house (1000, 5000 and 10000).  The notes are larger than US Dollars, but not by much, and about the same weight and thickness.


The 10,000 Note has a picture of Fukuzawa Yukichi on the front and a picture of the Phoenix Statue at a famous temple on the back.  Yukichi-san was a scholar, writer, teacher and translator, living from 1834-1904.  He founded Keio University.

The 5,000 Note has a picture of Ichiyō Higuchi on the front and a famous painting of irises on the back.  Higuchi-san was also an author and one of the first modern female authors in Japan.  She wrote 3 novels before dying of TB at age 24. 

The 1,000 Note has a picture of Hideyo Noguchi on the front and Mt. Fuji, Lake Motosu and Cherry blossoms on the back.  Noguchi-san lived from 1876-1928 and was a Japanese bacteriologist living in America who discovered syphillis as the cause of paralytic disease.

Although it is changing, Japan is still a very cash based culture.  Credit cards are not as widely accepted as they are in the US, especially at small stores and restaurants, and even in some taxis.  We were pleasantly surprised to find credit cards are able to be used more than we thought after we arrived, but we definitely carry more cash on us here than we do in the US.  Credit card processing is not as immediate as it is in the US either.  Our local grocery store only posts to Visa once every two weeks as far as we can tell, and the doctors office seemed to post once a month.  Because of all this, it is not uncommon to have 40,000 yen ($400) on you each day.  It's strange to walk around with that much money in your pocket at first, but once you realize that everyone else has it too and that crime is so low, the chance of getting it stolen is pretty low.  The chance of losing it, however...

As far as purchasing power, I did some quick checking of how expensive some normal household items are in Tokyo versus Minnesota to try and give you a picture of how much it costs to live here.  Here are some examples, based on recent currency exchange rates and adjusting for the size of the products.

I was looking at a Bloomberg report of the 2010 most expensive international cities today and Tokyo is #1, with Japan having 4 other cities in the top 10.  The other cities on the list are in Norway and Switzerland, and one in Angola!  These rankings were based on consumer goods and not things such as rent and living expenses.  New York was ranked #29 on this list. 

According to EuroCost International, Tokyo also has the highest cost of rent for expatriates (i.e. us!) worldwide.  New York ranks 7th in rent costs.

So there you have it, some (hopefully) interesting ramblings about money in Japan. 

March brings a month of travel for all of us and friends coming to visit!  I am sure I will be writing next month's anniversary post before I know it.  Today my day ends back in the US and soon on a shopping spree at Target.  Whoo hoo!

Kanpai!
Jess