Behold. The 1 yen coin.
Possibly the most useless denomination of currency in existence.
Possibly the most useless denomination of currency in existence.
I thought singular pennies were useless, but at least with pennies, you can sort of add them up for a bit and actually use them in a store, especially if you're buying cheap, old school sweets. But not in Japan. The 1 yen coin serves no use whatsoever. The equivalent to half a penny, the 1 yen coin feels very different to the other yen coins. It is much lighter and feels like plastic... it fact, it's like that fake money you'd use when you were a small child and were playing pretend shop, or whatever. Apparently they're made of 100% aluminium, which pretty much explains their weird properties when compared to other coins.
What's worse is nearly everything you buy in a shop is guaranteed to end you up with a couple of 1 yen coins... if you're lucky, you'll get enough change for 5 yen coins (which are just about bearable, but they're pretty touch and go themselves). Being on the road for 3 weeks of my trip to Japan, I found I was amassing quite a collection of 1 and 5 yen coins, which were making my wallet needlessly hefty. It got so bad at one point, that I resorted to leaving deposits of 1 yen coins in the bedrooms of hostels I'd stayed at, as I had nothing else to do with them. They were worth absolutely nothing and just an awkward thing to carry around. I'd neatly stack them in to columns, so it'd look like a fair hunk of change but on closer inspection, you'd be very disappointed.
On that note, I was always curious about what happened to the coins after my leaving them in the dorms. In Japan, it is not customary to leave a tip and in fact, leaving a tip is quite an offensive act from what I understand. It's hard to explain why, but it seems to be of the logic that the person being tipped would give the same service to any customer, and does not expect anything extra for a (presumably) high quality of service. Or something like that, I could be wrong. But would the cleaners be offended if they found these two columns of 1 yen and 5 yen coins sitting on a table in a dormitory, mistaking them for tips? Or would they just be like "some twat has left a bunch of coins on this table... oh and they're all over the floor. What a berk"? The mind boggles.
Anyway, possibly the worst thing about 1 yen coins is the fact you can't really spend them. At all. The way I dealt with my constantly amassing 10 yen coins was using vending machines. Since vending machines are plastered everywhere in Japan, if you've got twelve coins saved up, you can get yourself some Fanta Grape or Fanta Shakey Shakey*, or something equally awesome. However, none of these machines accept 1 or 5 yen coins. Which is rubbish! Further to this, I was told when I returned to Tokyo, that if paying with 1 yen coins in a shop or anything, the absolute maximum of the denomination you are allowed to use is nineteen. You are restricted to only nineteen 1 yen coins. I can sort of understand there being a restriction, I mean it'd be ludicrous to pay for even the smallest thing in 1 yen coins (as 100 yen is about 50p and is the basic price for a chocolate bar - important information, I know!) but why is the bar set at nineteen? What an arbitrary number to pick. At least there were one or two situations where I could use 5 yen coins, but 1 yen coins... rubbish.
*Soft drinks in Japan are awesome. But more on that another time.
Perhaps I am being harsh to the 1 yen coin. Afterall, a penny or a cent won't get you far in most places. However, I've never been aware of a continually growing threat of single pennies / cents in my wallet before, unlike with the 1 yen where my wallet was growing morbidly obese.
Yes, I know this is a weird topic for a blog, but I foudn some of my leftover Japanese change and felt inspired!
What's worse is nearly everything you buy in a shop is guaranteed to end you up with a couple of 1 yen coins... if you're lucky, you'll get enough change for 5 yen coins (which are just about bearable, but they're pretty touch and go themselves). Being on the road for 3 weeks of my trip to Japan, I found I was amassing quite a collection of 1 and 5 yen coins, which were making my wallet needlessly hefty. It got so bad at one point, that I resorted to leaving deposits of 1 yen coins in the bedrooms of hostels I'd stayed at, as I had nothing else to do with them. They were worth absolutely nothing and just an awkward thing to carry around. I'd neatly stack them in to columns, so it'd look like a fair hunk of change but on closer inspection, you'd be very disappointed.
On that note, I was always curious about what happened to the coins after my leaving them in the dorms. In Japan, it is not customary to leave a tip and in fact, leaving a tip is quite an offensive act from what I understand. It's hard to explain why, but it seems to be of the logic that the person being tipped would give the same service to any customer, and does not expect anything extra for a (presumably) high quality of service. Or something like that, I could be wrong. But would the cleaners be offended if they found these two columns of 1 yen and 5 yen coins sitting on a table in a dormitory, mistaking them for tips? Or would they just be like "some twat has left a bunch of coins on this table... oh and they're all over the floor. What a berk"? The mind boggles.
Anyway, possibly the worst thing about 1 yen coins is the fact you can't really spend them. At all. The way I dealt with my constantly amassing 10 yen coins was using vending machines. Since vending machines are plastered everywhere in Japan, if you've got twelve coins saved up, you can get yourself some Fanta Grape or Fanta Shakey Shakey*, or something equally awesome. However, none of these machines accept 1 or 5 yen coins. Which is rubbish! Further to this, I was told when I returned to Tokyo, that if paying with 1 yen coins in a shop or anything, the absolute maximum of the denomination you are allowed to use is nineteen. You are restricted to only nineteen 1 yen coins. I can sort of understand there being a restriction, I mean it'd be ludicrous to pay for even the smallest thing in 1 yen coins (as 100 yen is about 50p and is the basic price for a chocolate bar - important information, I know!) but why is the bar set at nineteen? What an arbitrary number to pick. At least there were one or two situations where I could use 5 yen coins, but 1 yen coins... rubbish.
*Soft drinks in Japan are awesome. But more on that another time.
Perhaps I am being harsh to the 1 yen coin. Afterall, a penny or a cent won't get you far in most places. However, I've never been aware of a continually growing threat of single pennies / cents in my wallet before, unlike with the 1 yen where my wallet was growing morbidly obese.
Yes, I know this is a weird topic for a blog, but I foudn some of my leftover Japanese change and felt inspired!
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