The main language spoken here is Japanese. Ninety-nine percent of people in Japan speak Japanese, but a few people in my dorm are from other countries, so I hear people speak French, Danish, German, Chinese, Polish and Indonesian.
Over here, the money is called yen, and the symbol for it looks like this: ¥.
Each US dollar is worth about 150 yen, meaning 1,000 yen is only worth about $6.60. Because of this, Japan has a lot of different bills and coins, so that even when you are paying thousands of yen, you can always get the right change. There are 500¥, 100¥, 50¥, 10¥, 5¥, and 1¥ coins. A 500¥ coin is worth $3.30, but a 1¥ coin is only worth 0.7 cents! Japan has a very cash-oriented economy, so I carry cash with me all the time and hardly ever use a card. It is also very common to carry around coin purses to carry all the coins they have!
A bottle of water in the supermarket could cost as low as 80¥, which is about 55 cents, but the prices are higher when you go to one of Japan's many vending machines. There are about 4 million vending machines in Japan, serving everything from cold drinks, hot coffee, ice cream, ramen, live crabs and more! Despite being 25 times smaller than America, Japan has half the number of vending machines.
