Meiji Japan adopts the yen as its currency
- When
- 1871
- Where
- Tokyo (institutional context; ministries including Finance relocated there by 1871)
- Episodes
- 1
The Meiji government officially adopted the yen as Japan's modern currency unit on 27 June 1871, allowing coins struck with the 1870 date to circulate. The New Currency Act defined the yen in gold and silver and divided it decimally into sen and rin. Ministries including the Ministry of Finance were located in Tokyo by 1871, providing the institutional setting for the new currency.
Episodes
Background and detail
Currency System. 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. Coins struck in 1870, including gold denominations produced at the San Francisco Mint and silver coins from Osaka, were prepared in advance. These coins remained uncirculated until the official adoption of the yen in mid-1871.
Implementation. The Japan Mint has issued legal tender coins from 1871 to the present. Subsidiary sen coins dated 1870 entered circulation only after the yen's official adoption in mid-1871. The issuance of yen banknotes began in 1872, two years after the currency was introduced, extending the new monetary unit into paper form.
People involved
- Meiji Government · Official authority adopting the currency
- Ministry of Finance · Relocated to Tokyo by 1871
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.