Trillions and Trillions of Yen
I see that Prime Minister Aso is set to release a 23 trillion yen stimulus package to help deal with the economic downturn in Japan's export-dependent economy. If you have no idea how much 23 trillion yen is, join the club, since I don't either. Because the individual value of the yen is so low against most other currencies, requiring 120 yen for a can of Coke, 80,000 yen to rent a small apartment or 2,500,000 yen to buy an average car, living in Japan means getting used to dealing with very high numbers. Values beyond ten million yen or so start to get really fuzzy in my mind, so when the government kicks around numbers involving trillions of yen, they might as well call it "infinity+1" as far as I'm concerned. The only hope I have of understanding large numbers is thinking about them in Japanese, thanks to the odd phenomenon that makes numbers at least comprehensible when thought of in kanji units, e.g. man (mahn) for 10,000, oku for 100 million, cho for 10 billion, and so on. For the record, 23 trillion yen is around USD$250 billion.
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:03 PM
4 Comments:
Eh? The thing with the Yen is that there's no decimal point. We're just used to dollars and cents.
If, instead of 2,500,000, you said "25,000.00 for a car" that's a lot more recognisable to nations who have a decimal point in the currency. Japan is no different, really; just divide the large numbers by ten to get a rough approximate.
That said, the grouping of digits into fours gets me every time.
9:28 PM
Yes, it's close enough to 100 so it's sort of easy to calculate. I'd prefer a yen rate of about 150 though, I don't mind the mathematical challenge of doing the calculation ^_^
12:41 AM
I am not sure a trillion dollars is any easier to understand, yet that is what the US deficit is predicted to be at for this year.
4:14 AM
Yes, although I always thought of $1 billion as "one space shuttle." So you could think of 1000 space shuttles we didn't get to build and say, dayyyymn.
9:56 AM
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