Ask John: Can You Explain Japanese Currency?

Question:
How much is 100 yen? Is that like a quarter in Japan? How much is a dollar in yen? I’ve been wondering so much about Japanese money. Do you know a lot about yen?

Answer:
Japanese currency actually isn’t all that different from what American are used to, the only major differences being that Japan has a 50 cent piece in place of a 25 cent piece, and Japanese currency doesn’t use decimals. Japanese currency consists of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500 yen coins, and 1000, 2000, 5000 and 10,000 yen notes. These would be equivalent to an American penny, nickel, dime, quarter (although the American quarter is 25 cents while the Japanese equivalent is worth 50 yen), dollar bill and five dollar bill. The common Japanese paper notes are equivalent to the American $10, $20 and $100 bills.

At the present time 100 yen is the equivalent of about 82 American cents. In other words, roughly 82 cents of American currency will buy you 100 yen worth of anime in Japan.

Since Japan doesn’t use decimal points to denote cents, the equivalent of American millions of dollars is, in Japan, billions of yen. The easiest way to quickly average currency in your head is to simply imagine a decimal point in two digits from the right end of all Japanese yen figures, then reduce the resulting number by about 20% to get the very rough equivalent in American dollars.