the tall blond guy goes to japan

Money money money

Grand Central

I got paid today. This is a good segue into talking about money and the weirdnesses of money in Japan. For example, the concept of a cheque is not known in Japan. When you owe someone money, you wire it through the post office, or you give them cash. Since I don't have an code that people can wire money to, I'm paid in cash. How very odd.

But anyway- the currency here is full of zeroes. What I've been doing to convert to Canadian dollars is knocking off the last two zeroes and adding a little bit. So, for example, Y2000 would be about $22 or so.

A Y5000 bill

The bills get as low as Y1000. In addition to the Y5000 in the picture, they also have Y10,000, which is the highest I've seen. Perhaps they have a Y100,000 bill as well, but I've never seen it. The change is more familliar to me though- I tend to accumulate lots and lots of it.

Yen coins, the entire family.

The top row has a Y1 piece, the most worthless of them all. I think it's aluminum or something similarly cheap. Next to it is the hard-to-find Y5 piece. Apparently, they're trying to phase out both the Y5 and the Y50 pieces (the two with the holes in the middle).

The middle row has a Y10 piece, the one I seem to have the most of all the time. They're horrid and very hard to get rid of. Next to it is that Y50 piece. Also very rare.

And the bottom row has the mose useful coin- the Y100 piece. Lots of vending machines sell things for Y100, so these are probably the best ones to have around. Next to it is the Y500 coin. It's just big.

Another form of currency here is the wierd magnetic card thing. I mentioned these when I was talking about the subway and JR trains... "stored value cards" are their nomes de plume, I think.

A JR card and a subway card (marked "SF" for some reason)

These things are cool. I have another one for the cafeteria in my office. You put a bunch of money into a vending machine, and this little card comes out. You can then use the card as you would cash. This is not a foreign concept to most people. But here they've taken it to a degree far beyond what another country might. Everything has stored value cards, from the telephones to the post office to the trains to the cafeterias. It's getting out of hand! For a while, I had four different cards in my wallet, along with my regular credit cards and such.