Brick of Cash
NOTE: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.
Clumped  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 3200 — image data
Clumped

Geez, where has the time gone!? Time seems to evaporate when researching stuff, and for the last several days I've had my head buried in setting up a big data-backup system at home and in the cloud (something I'm sure I'll post about soon).

Anyway, it's been a week since I posted the Bendy-Line “What am I?” Quiz where many people answered “paper”, and yes, it's paper, but there's a more expressive (dare I say “richer”?) answer....

Ragged  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/4, ISO 6400 — image data
Ragged
Sharp  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1600 — image data
Sharp
Dreamy  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1600 — image data
Dreamy
Wads each wad of one hundred 10,000-yen bills is worth about US $13,000  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1000 — image data
Wads
each wad of one hundred 10,000-yen bills is worth about US $13,000

Earlier this year I was given access to a huge pile of cash — ¥7,000,000 (about US $91,000) — though sadly that access was only photographic and not of the spendy kind. Still, I enjoy photographic opportunities wherever I can get them, and this one was definitely new and unlikely to be repeated.

700万円現金。 私の写真ですが、残念ながら、私のお金ではない.

Brick of Cash 7,000,000 Japanese yen, about US $91,000  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1250 — image data
Brick of Cash
7,000,000 Japanese yen, about US $91,000

The stack has 700 ten-thousand-yen (~$130) banknotes, each which of which carries the portrait of Yukichi Fukuzawa (福澤 諭吉), who played an important role both in the founding of modern Japan, and in forging early US-Japan relations, among very much else. A fitting selection for the honor of gracing the highest-denomination Japanese banknote.

And just for fun, for those materialistic moments, a couple of desktop backgrounds...

desktop background image of a stack of 7,000,000 Japanese yen (in 2012, about US $91,000)  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1100 — image data
Vertical Desktop-Background Versions
1050×1680  ·  1200×1920  ·  1600×2560
desktop background image of a stack of 7,000,000 Japanese yen (in 2012, about US $91,000)  --  Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 720 — image data
Desktop-Background Versions
1280×800  ·  1680×1050  ·  1920×1200  ·  2560×1600  ·  2880×1800

All 2 comments so far, oldest first...

Dude, you’re not getting off that easy… Where, why, who, when, how did you get that big stack of cheddar? Please elaborate! Relatively speaking that’s not so large a sum of green paper…err tan paper that you couldn’t get your hands on it but its not often that somebody says, “Hey can you hold this 90 grand for a second? ”

Since you’ve been in Japan forever do American greenbacks feel like fake money to you? When ever I obtain the very beautiful and ornate currencies of countries outside of the U.S. it takes a few days for it to sink in that this is actually real money and that spending it (even on vacation) should have the same pain value as spending (cheaper than yen) U.S. currency.

All the best! Looking forward to reading your posts about Ohio when I’m in Himeji.

— comment by Ron Evans on August 11th, 2012 at 5:00am JST (11 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

So THAT’s what you did with that money you borrowed from me!

Yeah, thanks. I used it all as a down payment for a Leica camera strap. —Jeffrey

— comment by Zachary on August 11th, 2012 at 10:51am JST (11 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink
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