Japanese yen
official currency of Japan
The yen (Japanese: 円; symbol: ¥; code: JPY) is the official currency of Japan. It is the third-most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar (USD) and the euro. It is also widely used as a third reserve currency after the USD and the euro.
The New Currency Act of 1871 introduced Japan's modern currency system, with the yen defined as 1.5 g (0.048 troy ounces) of gold, or 24.26 g (0.780 troy ounces) of silver, and divided decimally into 100 sen or 1,000 rin. The yen replaced the previous Tokugawa coinage as well as the various hansatsu paper currencies issued by feudal han (fiefs). The Bank of Japan was founded in 1882 and given a monopoly on controlling the money supply.
Following World War II, the yen lost much of its pre-war value as Japan faced a debt crisis and hyperinflation. Under the Bretton Woods system, the yen was pegged to the USD alongside other major currencies. After this system was abandoned in 1971 with the Nixon shock, the short-lived Smithsonian Agreement temporarily reinstated a fixed exchange rate. However, since the end of that system in February 1973, the yen has been a floating currency.
The public source identifies “Japanese yen” as official currency of Japan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Japanese, official and currency.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8146. The Library of Congress control number is sh91006335. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1871, 1882, 1971 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Japanese yen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.