→ The Story of a Yen
A brief look at the story of the yen.
There were originally 100 sen to the yen and 10 rin to the sen but by 1953, given hyperinflation, a rather large war, and the impact of the gold standard, the sen and the rin were abolished and the yen, no longer 1:1, was fixed at 360 to the dollar.
They may be worthless, but I like old coins. This history buff in me, I suppose. I'd love to get my hands on a sen and a rin coin.
He goes on to write that the coin is called yen in English instead of the actual pronunciation en because of a spelling error. Not necessarily true. It was labeled yen due to the Japanese spelling ゑん, the first character historically being pronounced ye. The pronunciation of ゑ shifted to e around the middle of the 18th century[†], but the old spelling was retained for some time and was still being used when the yen was introduced.
At any rate, the rest of the post is a good read.
Footnotes
†: And after WW2, the spelling was updated to えん. At that time the kanji was also simplified from 圓 to 円.
Link Blog
Back when I had my own website, I used to post a few random links everyday or every few days, in the style of http://kottke.org or http://daringfireball.net. Readers seemed to enjoy seeing them.
To signify a link post, I'll put an arrow (→) at the beginning of the title to show you guys it is a link post and that you can skip it if such things don't interest you.
 | David LaSpina is an American photographer lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time. More? |
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