The Japanese yen
Currency · JPY · ¥ · 1 country
On 27 June 1871 the Meiji government adopted the yen and folded the old units, the ryō, the bu and the shu, into a single decimal unit. The Bank of Japan has been the sole issuer of banknotes since it opened in 1882, and the Japan Mint strikes the coins. No fraction of a yen has circulated since the end of 1953.
The sign
In the decades after 1871 English writers abbreviated the yen with a plain capital Y. The barred ¥, a Y with one or two horizontal strokes, turns up in an 1899 book on the government of Kobe and spread in English-speaking countries before Japan took it up. The same sign serves the Chinese yuan. Japanese writing puts the kanji 円 after the amount instead.
The same sign stands for the Chinese yuan.
- ISO code
- JPY
- ISO number
- 392
- Fraction
- None, amounts are whole units
An amount, written out
¥1,234
- ¥1,234English
- ￥1,234JapaneseJapan
The sign in code
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, UTF-8
- HTML
¥¥¥- CSS
content: "\00A5";- JavaScript
"\u00A5"- UTF-8
0xC2 0xA5- UTF-16
0x00A5- UTF-32
0x000000A5
Where the Japanese yen is the official currency
Japan uses it everywhere, Okinawa included since 1972, when the island returned from US administration and gave up the dollar it had used since 1958.
About the Japanese yen
How the yen replaced the ryō
Money under the Edo shogunate meant metal coins alongside notes that the clans issued in their own regions, and the rates between them moved every day. Eastern Japan counted in gold and western Japan in silver. The two systems were never unified, and the gap between their gold and silver ratios drained gold abroad at the end of the shogunate.
The Meiji government put Ōkuma Shigenobu in charge of reform. He proposed round coins in place of square ones and a single name, the yen, in place of the ryō, the bu and the shu. Gold 5 yen coins were first struck in 1870 at the San Francisco Mint while a new mint was being built at Osaka. None of the coins dated 1870 circulated until the New Currency Act of 27 June 1871 made the yen law, on a decimal system in which the rin was a thousandth of a yen.
Why only the Bank of Japan issues notes
The new government printed its own notes from 1868. From 1872 it also let private national banks issue notes, and 153 of them were doing so by 1879. To pay for the Seinan civil war of 1877 the government printed more notes and borrowed from the national banks, and inflation followed.
The answer was one issuer. The Bank of Japan began operating on 10 October 1882, the Convertible Banknote Act followed in May 1884, and in May 1885 the Bank put out its first notes, a ten yen issue. National bank notes lost their right to circulate after 31 December 1899. Article 46 of the Bank of Japan Act is the present authority for the Bank's monopoly.
What the notes and coins look like now
The Bank issued a new series of 10,000, 5,000 and 1,000 yen notes on 3 July 2024. The 2004 notes remain valid. A 2,000 yen note, first issued on 19 July 2000, is rarely used. All the notes are 76 millimetres tall, and their length grows from 150 millimetres on the 1,000 yen note to 160 on the 10,000. The back of the new 1,000 yen note carries Hokusai's woodblock print of a wave off Kanagawa.
Six coins are current, from 1 to 500 yen, all struck by the Japan Mint, which has issued legal tender coins since 1871 and puts the value in kanji and the name of the state on every one. The 1 yen is pure aluminium, weighs a gram and will float on water if laid on it carefully. The 5 and 50 yen have holes through the middle. The 500 yen of 2021 is bicolour clad, with an edge of helical ridges cut at two different pitches. Imperial portraits have never appeared on a Japanese coin, and the year of minting is given in the era of the reigning emperor rather than the Gregorian calendar.
When the yen was fixed to the dollar
After a spell of instability the US occupation government fixed the yen at 360 to the US dollar on 25 April 1949, under the Dodge plan. The Smithsonian Agreement at the end of 1971 moved it to 308, and in early 1973 the fixed rates were abandoned and the yen floated.
Okinawa went its own way. Under US administration it used a separate B yen from 1946 to 1958 and then the US dollar, until the island returned to Japan in 1972 and the yen came back with it.
Common questions
Questions about the Japanese yen
Why is it spelled yen if the Japanese say en?
The spelling is older than the modern pronunciation. When Portuguese missionaries reached Japan in the sixteenth century, the Japanese e was pronounced closer to ye, and they wrote it that way. Walter Henry Medhurst, working from a Japanese and Dutch dictionary, kept some of those ye spellings in his vocabulary. James Curtis Hepburn followed him in the first full Japanese and English dictionary of the Meiji era, and that book is the likely source of yen in English. Hepburn dropped most of the ye spellings in his third edition, too late for the currency.
Are sen and rin still used in Japan?
No. Law No. 60 of 15 July 1953 abolished the small denominations, and both fractions left circulation at the end of that year. Sen coins had been struck since 1870, in silver at first; the rin, a thousandth of a yen, went back to 1873. The ISO list now gives the yen no minor unit at all.
What does the character 円 on Japanese money mean?
It is the Japanese word for round, and the yen takes its name from it. Spanish and Mexican silver coins reaching China through the Philippines were called silver rounds for their shape, and the coins and the word reached Japan too. The same root gave the Chinese yuan and the Korean won.
Where are Japanese coins made, and who issues the notes?
The coins come from the Japan Mint, which has struck legal tender since 1871. The notes are the Bank of Japan's alone under Article 46 of the Bank of Japan Act, a monopoly it has held since its first notes of May 1885 retired the government and national bank notes that came before.