A few weeks ago I picked up an interesting job. I was hired to teach a cultural training course preparing a group of foreigners for Japanese life. I get these jobs sometimes, usually when an American company send over some workers for a few years and wants them to fit in instead of being the typical "Hairy Western Barbarians". This is the largest group I've had in a long time.

There are a number of books for this kind of thing, and I use them. But I don't like them so I am always working on my own supplements to the book and my own material.

In addition to all the culture stuff, there is a lot of practical material as well. One section is all about numbers, units, conversions, that kind of thing. I don't really like how the book presented it so I skipped around a lot. I need to work up my own overhead for this.

Numbers are an interesting thing in languages. Typically numbers are the hardest things for people to translate in their heads and convert. And if you ask people to do math in another language... forget it. In fact, I've often read that the British would catch spys during WWII by asking them to do math outloud. German spies could rarely pass that test, evidently.

Japanese throws us for even more of a loop, because Japanese has a fourth base unit, making a division of four instead of a division of three. What do I mean by that? Well let's look.

So in the West we have

• tens
• hundreds
• thousands

And in Japan they add a new unit. The new unit is for 10,000, which the Japanese call a mahn (万).

Therefore:

• 100,000 is jū man (十万), or ten ten-thousands
• 1,000,000 is hyaku man (百万) or one hundred ten-thousands
• 10,000,000 is sen man (千万) or one thousand ten-thousands
• 100,000,000 is a new unit (oku, 億) and then it all repeats

There are quite a few larger units after oku, reoccuring every four places. As I understand it, this is due to the Buddhist cosomology, which requires very very very large numbers. But anyway, let's not worry about any of them right now.

Looking at the above you might see that if we used the same logic as in the West, we'd move that comma over one, making for groups of four instead of three. (e.g. 1,0000 instead of 10,000). And, along with this line of reasoning, I've been told that indeed they used to break numbers into groups of four rather than three in the past.

Consider 1 oku: 100,000,000. Wouldn't 1,0000,0000 make it easier to see what's going on?

But good old Western influence raises her head and that's why they switched to groups of three, despite it not entirely fitting the number system in use.

This system came from China and is shared by Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam. In English we call it the myraid system, using the the Greek word for ten-thousand "μυριάς" (myrias).

Because we write the numbers the same, there are no problems exchanging data between Japan and other countries. But when spoken... there is the challenge.

Because of this, you'll find an interesting thing in Japan. Among foreigners, even when they are speaking English to each other, they will use the Japanese numbr system, saying to each other, for example, "The Playstation 5 costs go mahn", using go mahn (five mahn) instead of fifty-thousand. It's just easier to stay in the Japanese number system full time and use the Japanese words to do so instead of going back and forth in your head.

So anywhere, there we go. I'm thinking about making a few slides or handouts with something like that instead of covering an entire chapter of the book. What do you think? Is that good or should I add anything? More of the history perhaps? More examples of usage? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.