Money in Japan.

Japan's currency is the yen (JPY), written ¥, and unlike most currencies it has no everyday subunit, so prices are whole numbers with no small change to fumble. Coins run ¥1, ¥5, ¥10, ¥50, ¥100 and ¥500, and notes come in ¥1,000, ¥5,000 and ¥10,000, with a rarely-seen ¥2,000. The ¥500 coin is worth several dollars, so your coin purse carries real money here; keep it for vending machines, lockers and ticket gates.

In 2024 Japan issued redesigned ¥1,000, ¥5,000 and ¥10,000 notes with new portraits and 3D holograms. The old notes stay legal tender indefinitely, so both designs circulate side by side and either is fine to spend. To orient yourself on prices: a convenience-store meal runs about ¥400 to ¥700, a bowl of ramen ¥600 to ¥1,200, a short metro ride ¥170 to ¥310, and a coffee ¥300 to ¥500.

In the cities your card handles most things. Visa and Mastercard are accepted across hotels, department stores, chain restaurants, all the major convenience stores and larger shops, and JCB (Japan's home network) is near-universal. American Express works at bigger and tourist-facing places but is patchier at small independents, so don't make Amex your only card. Where you'll still hit cash-only is the local end of things: owner-run restaurants and izakaya, ramen and gyudon ticket machines, temples and shrines, market and festival stalls, and smaller places in rural towns. Both debit and credit cards work anywhere Visa or Mastercard is: a debit card is what you'll lean on at ATMs, while a good travel credit card usually adds purchase protection and no foreign-transaction fee.

A pleasant difference from much of Asia: Japanese merchants generally don't surcharge for card payment, so the price on the tag is the price you pay. The cost to watch is your own bank's foreign-transaction fee on payments abroad, typically up to about 3%, which is exactly what the calculator below helps you dodge with the right card.

Contactless has spread quickly. Visa and Mastercard tap-to-pay now works at most chains, hotels and tourist businesses, and Apple Pay and Google Pay work wherever a reader takes contactless, handing over a one-time token instead of your card number. Trains are catching up too: contactless bank-card acceptance is expanding across the Tokyo-area rail and subway networks, so on a growing number of lines you can tap a card straight at the gate, alongside the IC cards below. Taxis mostly take cards and IC cards now, though older cabs in rural areas can still prefer cash.

Japan is the rare high-tech country where you genuinely still need cash. Cards and IC cards cover the cities, but plenty of small restaurants, ticket machines, markets, rural shops and temples and shrines take only yen, and walking into a cash-only restaurant is one of the most common surprises for first-time visitors. Temple and shrine extras in particular (entry, charms, and the goshuin stamp books many visitors collect) are almost always cash. You don't need to carry a fortune, though: around ¥10,000 to ¥20,000 on you covers a day or two comfortably, and you can top up from a convenience-store ATM as you go rather than pulling out a huge sum.

Unlike much of Asia, Japan isn't a place where a back-street money changer beats everything else. Exchange rates at airports and banks are relatively fair by global standards, and for most people a convenience-store ATM withdrawal works out as cheap or cheaper than changing cash. So the honest advice here is short: don't overthink it, and don't bring a big wad of yen from home.

Japan's cashless side splits into two things, and for a visitor the first matters far more than the second. IC cards (Suica, Pasmo and the regional ICOCA) are tap-and-go smartcards that pay for trains and buses and double as electronic money at convenience stores, vending machines and many shops. For a tourist they're functionally interchangeable, so just get whichever you're offered; a Suica works in Osaka and an ICOCA works in Tokyo. QR wallets like PayPay are what a lot of locals now pay with, but they're harder for tourists to use directly. Sort out an IC card and you've covered most of what QR does.

Most visitors never need this, so keep it short: if you're paying a hotel or apartment deposit, sending money to family, or funding a longer stay, the rate you're quoted is rarely the rate you get. The real cost usually isn't the visible fee, it's a markup buried in the exchange rate.

The benchmark is the mid-market rate you'd see on Google. Specialist services (our default pick is Wise) track within about 1% of it and pay out in yen to a Japanese bank account within a day or two, where a high-street bank wire can quietly cost several percent once the rate markup and correspondent-bank fees are counted.