The yen replaced the previous Tokugawa coinage as well as the various hansatsu paper currencies issued by feudal han (fiefs).

To stabilize the Japanese economy, the exchange rate of the yen was fixed at ¥360 per US$ as part of the Bretton Woods system.

The Japanese government focused on a competitive export market, and tried to ensure a low exchange rate for the yen through a trade surplus.

[4] Since that time, however, the world price of the yen has greatly decreased, falling to an average of almost ¥158 per dollar and ¥171 per euro in July 2024.

[8][9][10] The sharp fall in the value of the currency has led some companies, including Modec, to stop presenting their financial statements in Japanese yen.

[11] However, this weakness has had some benefits for Japan's tourism industry, as the low exchange rate makes its purchasing power attractive for travellers, particularly those from foreign nations.

While the Chinese eventually replaced 圆; 圓 with 元,[a] the Japanese continued to use the same word, which was given the shinjitai form 円 in reforms at the end of World War II.

The spelling and pronunciation "yen" is standard in English, because when Japan was first encountered by Europeans around the 16th century, Japanese /e/ (え) and /we/ (ゑ) were both pronounced [je].

He worked with Inoue Kaoru, Itō Hirobumi, and Shibusawa Eiichi to run the Ministry of Finance, seeking to introduce a modern monetary system into Japan.

Ōkuma eventually proposed that coins, which were previously square, be made into circles, and that the names of the traditional currencies, ryō (両), bu (分) and shu (朱), be unified into yen (円), which was accepted by the government.

[21] Other rejected proposals included physical weight units of "Fun" and "Momme" which never made it past the pattern stage.

[31] This Act formally stipulated the adoption of the decimal accounting system of yen (1, 圓), sen (1⁄100, 錢), and rin (1⁄1000, 厘).

Japanese yen denominated paper currency was also conceived with the coins in 1870 as Meiji Tsuho notes by Italian engraver Edoardo Chiossone.

[41] This exchange rate remained in place until Japan left the gold standard in December 1931, after which the yen fell to $0.30 by July 1932 and to $0.20 by 1933.

After a period of instability, on April 25, 1949, the U.S. occupation government fixed the value of the yen at ¥360 per USD through a United States plan, which was part of the Bretton Woods system, to stabilize prices in the Japanese economy.

Following the United States' measures to devalue the dollar in the summer of 1971, the Japanese government agreed to a new, fixed exchange rate as part of the Smithsonian Agreement, signed at the end of the year.

However, the new fixed rates of the Smithsonian Agreement were difficult to maintain in the face of supply and demand pressures in the foreign-exchange market.

The government, therefore, continued to intervene heavily in foreign-exchange marketing (buying or selling dollars), even after the 1973 decision to allow the yen to float.

[47] Despite intervention, market pressures caused the yen to continue climbing in value, peaking temporarily at an average of ¥271 per US$ in 1973, before the impact of the 1973 oil crisis was felt (this was retroactively called endaka, although the term was only coined in 1985).

[47] During the first half of the 1980s, the yen failed to rise in value, though current account surpluses returned and grew quickly.

Finance officials from major nations signed an agreement (the Plaza Accord) affirming that the dollar was overvalued (and, therefore, the yen undervalued).

The number of purchases is so large that it is expected to double the money supply, but this move has sparked concerns that the authorities in Japan are deliberately devaluing the yen to boost exports.

[51] However, the commercial sector in Japan worried that the devaluation would trigger an increase in import prices, especially for energy and raw materials.

[52] To counter this, the BOJ conducted currency interventions of more than JPY 9 trillion selling the dollar and buying the yen in the September–October 2022 and April–May 2024 periods respectively.

This has not happened to date, since the yen remains trusted globally despite its low unit value, and due to the huge costs of reissuing new currency and updating currency-reading hardware.

Due to the great differences in style, size, weight and the pattern present on the edge of the coin they are easy for people with visual impairments to tell apart from one another.

The mintage period for five rin coins was brief as they were discontinued after only four years of production due to their sharp decline in monetary value.

Before and during World War II, various bodies issued banknotes in yen, such as the Ministry of Finance and the Imperial Japanese National Bank.

[52] The special drawing rights (SDR) valuation is an IMF basket of the world's major reserve currencies, including the Japanese yen.

[8][85][86] Interviewed by Asahi Shimbun Digital in September 2022, Izuru Kato, chief economist at Totan Research, expressed concern about the sharp fall in its value since 2022.