The Japanese yen (円 or 圓, en^?) (sign: ¥; code: JPY) is the official currency of Japan. It is the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar and the euro. It is also widely used as a reserve currency after the U.S. dollar, the euro and the pound sterling. As is common when counting in East Asia, large quantities of yen are often counted in multiples of 10,000 (man, 万) in the same way as values in Western countries are often quoted in thousands.

Yen is pronounced "en" [eɴ] in Japanese. The word (Shinjitai: 円, Traditional Chinese/Kyūjitai: 圓) literally means "round object" in Japanese, as yuán does in Chinese or won in Korean. Originally, Chinese had traded silver in mass (see sycee) and when Spanish and Mexican silver coins arrived, they called them 銀圓 (silver round) for their circular shapes. The coins and the name also appeared in Japan. Later, the Chinese replaced 圓 with 元 which has the same pronunciation in Mandarin (but not in Japanese). The Japanese preferred 圓 which remains until now (albeit in its simplified form, 円, since the end of World War II).

Toshio Masuda (舛田 利雄, Masuda Toshio^?, born October 5, 1927 in Kobe, Japan) is a Japanese film director. He developed a reputation as a consistent box office hit-maker. Over the course of five decades, 16 of his films made the yearly top ten lists at the Japanese box office—a second place record in the industry. Between 1958 and 1968 he directed 52 films for the Nikkatsu Company. He was their top director of action films and worked with the company's top stars, including Yujiro Ishihara with whom he made 25 films. After the breakdown of the studio system, he moved on to a succession of big-budget movies including the American-Japanese co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and the science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974). He worked on such anime productions as the Space Battleship Yamato series. His corporate drama Company Funeral (1989) earned him a Japanese Academy Award nomination and wins at the Blue Ribbon Awards and Mainichi Film Awards. In Japan, his films are well remembered by fans and called genre landmarks by critics. He remains little known abroad save for rare exceptions of his post-Nikkatsu work such as Tora! Tora! Tora!. However, a number of his films were screened in a 2005 Nikkatsu Action Cinema retrospective in Italy and a few have since made their way to the United States. At the age of 81, he is currently prepping to helm Uchū Senkan Yamato: Fukkatsu hen (2009).