What is the currency used in Japan?

What is the currency used in Japan? The answer is the Japanese yen. Its international currency code is JPY, and its symbol is ¥. The yen is issued and managed by the Bank of Japan, the country’s central bank, and is divided into 100 sen in historical accounting, although sen coins are no longer used in everyday payments.

Japan formally adopted the yen through the New Currency Act of 1871 during the Meiji period. The reform replaced a complicated mixture of Tokugawa-era coins and feudal paper currencies with a decimal monetary system. The word “yen” reflects the character 円, meaning “round,” referring to the shape of modern coins.

Common mix-ups include confusing the yen with China’s yuan, which also uses a related Chinese character and may share the ¥ symbol in some contexts. Japan’s familiar circulating money includes ¥1, ¥5, ¥10, ¥50, ¥100, and ¥500 coins, plus banknotes such as ¥1,000, ¥5,000, and ¥10,000.