Approximate Historical Yen Values

When an amount of money is quoted in older media (or media set in a historical period), it can be difficult to discern how much that money would have been worth at the time. This goes doubly when dealing with another country than one's own, as it will have experienced different patterns of development and inflation. I provide this page as a humble reference to the approximate domestic value of Japanese yen in the past 60 years, relative to the year 2016 in which this was written.

Values should be taken as increasingly rough estimates the further back they go. In the case of Japan, the complex nature of the war and post-war period mean that great care should be taken in extrapolating this data to the 1940s or early 1950s. (Indeed, I avoided going further back partly for that reason.) For works set even further in the past, basic changes in society and industry mean one simply must have familiarity with the particular economics of the period. (In English, any number of excellent books on the Victorian era should suffice to give an idea of the kinds of differences one may find in such cases.)

These numbers are intended to represent the domestic purchasing power of the yen, not its value on international markets. In other words, these numbers represent the typical prices facing a Japanese person paying for food, rent, medical care, etc.; the value an average person would put on their money. Imports and exports raise additional considerations not addressed here (although this is not likely to be a concern for most media).

For clarity, I present the ratio of yen values in two ways: first, the amount of money an item that costs 100 yen right now would have cost in the past year; second, the amount of money an item that cost 100 yen in that year would cost now. For example, if we want to understand how expensive a 10000 yen medical bill in 1974 would have seemed to people at the time, we use the second column to find that it would be roughly equal to 23500 yen today.

Sources:
Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan (http://www.stat.go.jp/index.htm)
Japanese Cabinet Office (http://www.cao.go.jp/)

Return to the Main Page