Official Adoption of the Yen
- When
- 27 June 1871
- Where
- Tokyo (institutional context; ministries including Finance relocated there by 1871)
The Meiji government officially adopted the yen as Japan's modern currency unit on 27 June 1871, after which coins struck with the 1870 date circulated.
None of the coins dated 1870 circulated until the Meiji government officially adopted the yen as Japan's modern unit of currency on 27 June 1871. The New Currency Act of 1871 defined the yen as 1.5 g of gold or 24.26 g of silver, divided decimally into 100 sen or 1,000 rin. The adoption took place within a government whose ministries, including the Ministry of Finance, had been relocated to Tokyo by 1871; the passages do not state the precise site of the adoption decision.
Sources
- Japanese yen Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-07
- Tokyo Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-26
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.