This is a ¥500 coin, the largest value coin in Japan. Not too long ago it was worth roughly $5, but now with the rapidly declining yen, it is only worth about $3.33. Even if we stick to the yen, inflation has made it much less useful than it once was. Time was when we could find a lot of sales or deals based around this ¥500 coin. They'd call themselves one coin deals or something like that, using "one coin" to refer to the fact that just single coin has a relatively large buying power. Unfortunately these kinds of sales have grown less over the years as inflation makes ¥500 less valuable than it once was.

Still, I like the coin. It's nice to have a coin that has some degree of buying power. In the US while we do have $1 coin, vending machines refuse to update for it and banks don't give it out, making it somewhat rare to circulate and to receive. We also have a half dollar coin in America, but it also isn't common. I'd imagine the larger size makes it less desirable which prevents general circulation. This leaves the quarter dollar coin as the largest common coin. Even when I was a kid, $0.25 couldn't buy you very much, and it is even less today.

That in mind, maybe you can see why having a coin smaller (but slightly thicker) than a quarter but many times the value might tickle my fancy. I know $5 in value (roughly) is a far far cry from back in the day when the eagles were in circulation and one could carry (if one were rich and a little crazy) what was then $20 in value in a single coin, but adjusted for inflation would be roughly $637 in value (using the year of 1913 for this adjustment). Yeah a tiny $5 coin in comparison to that might be small, but in comparison to the common coins in use today, it's pretty nice.

^{From here}

[A more fair comparison might have been a silver dollar, which would have been something the common man might have been more likely to use. Worth $1 at the time, but roughly $30 when adjusted for inflation. Can you imagine carrying around a $30 coin in your pocket today?]

But I also swing the other way. So on one hand, I love the idea of carrying around a few coins worth a lot of money, but on the other hand I love the idea of carrying around just my phone with all my money on it, using Apple Pay or any one of the smaller services available for digital payment (we have a lot of them here in Japan) and never having to mess with cash or a physical credit card.

Hmm... I guess I prefer the second way. It's just too convenient. It's be even better if I could be using BTC or HBD on my phone and not Apple Pay, but baby steps, eh? I still do love the idea of carrying coins that have value though!

How about you?

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.