The US dollar is issued by the Federal Reserve System; the Board is the issuing authority for Federal Reserve notes, which the Bank notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity. The yen is issued by the Bank of Japan, which describes itself as the sole issuer of banknotes in Japan under Article 46 of the Bank of Japan Act — a role it has held since 1882, with the first Bank of Japan notes released in May 1885. Denominations in issue are 10,000, 5,000, 2,000 and 1,000 yen. The yen is the one currency in common use with no minor unit at all: ISO 4217 lists JPY, numeric 392, with zero minor units, against USD, numeric 840, with two. A yen amount is a whole number, and there is no yen equivalent of a cent.

USD/JPY is the second-largest currency pair in the market. The BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey for April 2025 recorded it at 14.3% of global OTC foreign exchange turnover, with the yen on one side of 16.8% of all trades. Goods trade is large and one-sided — the US Census Bureau recorded 2025 US exports to Japan of $81.4 billion against imports of $145.8 billion. Travel has become a major second channel: the Japan National Tourism Organization reported 42,683,600 visitor arrivals to Japan in 2025, of which 3,306,800 came from the United States, and the US National Travel and Tourism Office recorded 1.967 million arrivals in the United States from Japan in 2025.

The Bank of Japan’s stated objective is price stability — it set a price stability target of 2% year-on-year change in the consumer price index in January 2013 — and its Policy Board decides the guideline for money market operations at eight meetings a year. Worth knowing, because it is widely misattributed: the Bank of Japan does not decide foreign exchange intervention. Under the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act the Minister of Finance is legally authorised to conduct intervention, and the Bank of Japan states that it "conducts foreign exchange interventions on behalf of and at the instruction of the minister", executing through its Financial Markets Department. Japan’s Ministry of Finance publishes the intervention amounts itself, monthly and quarterly, with the monthly archive running back to April 1991 — so this is one of the few places in FX where an official action leaves a published number.

The zero minor unit changes how amounts behave. Converting into yen produces a whole-number result with no cents to carry, so rounding happens at the unit rather than the hundredth, and a quoted USD/JPY rate is normally carried to more decimal places than a EUR-style pair precisely because one yen is a much smaller amount of value than one dollar. On the dollar side, the Federal Reserve’s H.10 release publishes noon buying rates in New York for cable transfers, certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for customs purposes under section 522 of the amended Tariff Act of 1930 — a specific statutory job, not a general-purpose dealing rate. As with every pair, the foreign exchange settlement week runs 5.5 days: CLSSettlement closes 02:00 CET on Saturday and reopens 22:00 CET on Sunday.