I see that Prime Minister Aso is set to release a 23 trillion yen stimulus package to help deal with the economic downturn in Japan’s export-dependent economy. If you have no idea how much 23 trillion yen is, join the club, since I don’t either. Because the individual value of the yen is so low against most other currencies, requiring 120 yen for a can of Coke, 80,000 yen to rent a small apartment or 2,500,000 yen to buy an average car, living in Japan means getting used to dealing with very high numbers. Values beyond ten million yen or so start to get really fuzzy in my mind, so when the government kicks around numbers involving trillions of yen, they might as well call it “infinity+1” as far as I’m concerned. The only hope I have of understanding large numbers is thinking about them in Japanese, thanks to the odd phenomenon that makes numbers at least comprehensible when thought of in kanji units, e.g. man (mahn) for 10,000, oku for 100 million, cho for 10 billion, and so on. For the record, 23 trillion yen is around USD$250 billion.
