Although China and Japan both use ¥ for their currency symbol, the han character for the
renminbi currency 元 (
yuan) is wholly unrelated to the Japanese 円 (
yen) character.
Also, In Microsoft's Japanese
OSes, the
backslash is rendered as the yen currency symbol under its default
Shift-JIS encoding. (ex: c:¥>)
The modern Japanese currency was established in 1871 (
Meiji 4). The idea for chosing 円 (which means circle) as the national currency came about from the fact that people often made a
circle out of their
thumb and
index finger to represent
money, hence it would be best for
public acceptance. One yen (worth slightly less than a US
cent) is equivalent to 100 sen. Sen
coins are no longer made in Japan, but the unit is still used when talking about
exchange rates, nowadays. Yen is pronounced as "en", but is still spelled with a "y". This is due to the fact that the Japanese writing system used to include
the
ye characters (ゑ,
ヱ) in the past. The
e characters (え,
エ) has since replaced the ye characters in
hiragana and
katakana after the latter
phoneme died from the language.