Blog entry by Lorenzo Brough
Not necessarily, but a good education opens the door to a wider choice of jobs. TOKYO, July 3 (Reuters) - Japan began circulating its first new banknotes in 20 years on Wednesday, featuring three-dimensional portraits of the founders of financial and female education institutions in an attempt to frustrate counterfeiters. Key companies are raising workers' wages at the fastest rate in 33 years, but lingering inflation, fed by the rapid weakening of the yen currency, keeps consumption and the mood of business sluggish, recent economic data show.
Existing bills will stay in use, but train stations, parking lots and ramen shops are scrambling to upgrade payment machines as the government pushes consumers and businesses to use less cash in its bid to digitise the economy. Many Japanese fast-food restaurants such as ramen shops and beef bowl stores use ticket machines to cut labour costs, but some small business owners battling inflation are unhappy at the extra investment needed.
The notes use printed patterns to generate holograms of the portraits facing different directions, depending on the angle of view, employing a technology that Japan's National Printing Bureau says is the world's first for paper money. "The machine replacement has no sales impact, so it's only negative for us, on top of rising costs of labour and ingredients," said Shintaro Sekiguchi, who spent about 600,000 yen for ticket machines at three ramen shops he runs in Tokyo.
($1=161.6500 yen) (Reporting by Irene Wang; Additional reporting by Takahiko Wada; Writing by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Stephen Coates) Nearly 90% of bank ATMs, train ticket machines and retail cash registers are ready for the new bills, but only half of restaurant and parking ticket machines, the Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers Association said. "It might take until year-end to respond to this," said Takemori Kawanami, an executive at ticket machine company Elcom.
"That's too slow, but we are short of components," he added, as client orders for upgrades exceeded expectations. The new 5,000-yen bill portrays educator Umeko Tsuda (1864-1929), who founded one of the first women's universities in Japan, while the 1,000-yen bill features a pioneering medical scientist, Shibasaburo Kitasato (1853-1931). While Kishida talked up the latest technology to fight counterfeiting, it is not a major problem in Japan. The 681 fake banknotes police detected in 2023 represented a sharp drop from a record high of 25,858 in 2004.
Cashless payments in Japan have almost tripled over the past decade to account for 39% of consumer spending in 2023, but still lag global peers and should rise to 80% to boost productivity, the government says.