If you live to be 75 years old, you will live approximately 650,000 hours. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a lot, especially when you can buy a very nice house for $650,000, the same number, but a huge amount in dollars (and which would cost you one dollar per hour to live there). On the other hand, in yen, 650,000 would only be a couple months' salary. Hardly seems fair, does it?

I often see newly arrived foreigners in Japan fumbling with this new yen currency, trying to find exact change for a purchase or trying to figure out if their lunch costs ¥2,000 or ¥20,000. And you can hardly blame them for being confused; in many other countries nothing in everyday life requires you to think much beyond the number 100. You'd never pay $2,000 for lunch, for example. We are left scratching our heads: How can it cost that much?

In addition, we have preconceptions about certain numbers that may not let us move forward with the new currency. When I came to Japan to work and was told that my salary would be ¥3.5 million, I felt like I had won the lottery. Three and a half million yen! I spent days planning how I was going to spend it all: traveling the world, giving to charities, buying new socks.