1 yen

Behold. The 1 yen coin.


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!

Currry Kuri Mix

In Tokyo I was staying with my aunt, uncle and cousin in this nice little district called Ikegami. Whilst it was part of Tokyo, one of the most frantic cities in existance, the immediate area around the station extending to a few minutes away to the temple, had an extremely 'small town' feel to it - something I definitely wouldn't have expected. As a result, my aunt and uncle would frequnelty bump in to people they knew and as a result, I met a lot of random Japanese people. There was one family in particular who various members of owned certain shops on this small little street. One was a Japanese sweet store (where we given this strange but rather tasty plain jelly like thing, covered in cane sugar - definitely a new one for the taste-buds), another was a curry restaurant and I forget what the other two were. At least, I think there were two. The curry restaurant was owned by the son of the sweet shop owner, who ran that shop with his sister. I think. Probably mistaken somewhere.

Anyway, my aunt took Alex and I to the curry restaurant one day. She chose this day in particular because she had been invited to sort of help fill up the restaurant as it was being filmed for a sort of 'dining in Tokyo' program that was played on Japanese telly. We were all slightly more dressed up than usual (I say that, in my case I just kept my hair tied back and wore a shirt... I was still sporting a bit of a hobo beard) just so that Alex and I particularly didn't look as Western-styled-lack-of-appearance-effort-making* as usual.

*Absolutely ridiculous use of hyfenating, I realise. But it conveys the point, almost. Basically, one thing you become incredibly aware of in Japan, if you are a Westerner, is that they are an incredibly fashion conscious group of people. Everyone (sweeping generalisation) has designer clothes and styled hair. If you're walking around with long bushy hair, sporting fuzz all around your face and wearing jeans and a Megadeth t-shirt, you're certainly going to stand out more than you would if you had dyed brown hair spiked up in a variety of ways, a tailored shirt and some Louis Vuitton related accessories. Everyone had brown hair. Seriously.

It wasn't a huge restaurant, but it was nice and quite cosy. We were ushered by my aunt's restaurant owning friends in to the last remaining table in the corner, and took our seats. At the time, there were some local monks-in-training from the temple up the road eating their meals and being interviewed by the camera crew (who could barely fit properly in the restaurant, mind, with their ginormous equipment). There were two slightly more experienced monks with short, jet black hair eating, one of them just finishing off being interviewed. Sitting opposite them on their table was a less experienced monk, symbolised by his shaved head (or so I was told). All throughout his interview with the camera crew, his seniors kept giggling loudly at his answers - he got quite embarassed by the end of it, I'm pretty sure he wasn't saying anything funny. They were just being monk-hazers. To our surprise, my aunt and I were interviewed too. My aunt being Indian, it sort of made sense that they asked her what she thought about the curry being served (Indian blood makes you the authority on curry). Of course, having lived in Japan for years and consequently being fluent in the language, the interview went smoothly for her. They insisted on interviewing me due to the half-Indianness apparently also making me a vague authority on curry. Cue awkward interview. Every question I was asked was responded by me blankly staring, awaiting a summary translation from my aunt. Then my deliberately short English answers were translated by my aunt to the TV crew, her effectively acting as an interpreter (and a very good one). I was asked what I thought of the curry, to which I basically said it was good, and what I was doing in Japan. They asked me places I intended to see on my travels, and were quite surprised by some of my options, specifically Okayama, but this was later explained to me why (in fact I later realised why - I'll detail why later). Anyway, so the interview finished, we continued chowing down on curry. We were told it was quite unlikely our clip would be used, which was understandable, and if it was, it'd be a short little snippet. Now this was at the very beginning of my trip (the first week of it, in fact), so around May 15th ish. The show wasn't to be on until the evening of June 21st, the very day I actually left Japan, so understandably the entire thing had left my mind.

Fast forward to yesterday, and I get an email from my aunt saying we were actually on the show! (The perceptive ones amongst you might realise that my aunt had taken her time to notify me of this development, but let's be fair it's not really that important [...important enough to make a lengthy blog entry about, mind you]). Apparently there was a close up of my aunt and I, and a bit of our interviews. How bizarre. After it aired, my aunt received a lot of phone calls and emails from friends (presumably to be like "oh my God, you're on TV!" sort of thing). So yeah. In Japan for 6 weeks and I manage to get myself on the box within the first week. I could make some kind of joke about being big in Japan, but that'd just be a lie.
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On that note, I feel I should dispell a certain rumour about Japan. They're not all small people, in fact that's just a gross misinterpretation perpetrated by presumably tall people. I named this blog 'Big In Japan' as I made it before I went there, hoping to finally feel vaguely tall (I am a tad below average height in Britain land), but no! I was disappointed to discover that most Japanese dudes aren't smaller than me - I'm basically average height there. The only properly small people in Japan are the old ones with crooked backs, presumably caused by years of rice-farming labour, or so I was told. I've never seen anything like that before actually, a lot of senior Japanese citizens have bent backs - it must be quite the strain for them, poor people.

Uh... yeah. Curry put me on telly.