Prices in Japan 🇯🇵
What 7 everyday items cost in Japan, shown in US dollars, in JPY, and as roughly how long someone earning the average local wage works to buy one.
Japan is the clearest case in the game of a country that stopped feeling expensive. A weak yen has pushed dollar prices well below where they sat a decade ago, and the Big Mac Index now scores the yen as one of the most undervalued major currencies. Fruit is the exception — premium apples are a gift category and priced like one.
What things cost
| Item | USD | Local | Work time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Mac | $3.03 | 480 JPY | 11 min |
| Coca-Cola (330ml can) | $1.15 | 180 JPY | 4 min |
| Cappuccino | $3.14 | 497 JPY | 12 min |
| Milk (1 litre) | $1.47 | 233 JPY | 6 min |
| Eggs (dozen) | $2.07 | 328 JPY | 8 min |
| Apples (1 kg) | $4.94 | 782 JPY | 19 min |
| Gasoline (1 litre) | $1.09 | 173 JPY | 4 min |
Local-currency figures are converted from US dollars at recent exchange rates, except the Big Mac, which is published in local currency by The Economist and converted the other way. Work time divides the dollar price by an estimated average hourly wage — the roughest number on this page. See methodology.
How Japan compares
Relative to the rest of the game, Japan is most expensive for apples, where it ranks 3rd out of 32 countries at $4.94 — against a global median of $2.84.
It is relatively cheapest for big mac at $3.03, which is 29th of 33 — only 4 countries in the game are cheaper.
Measured against local earnings rather than dollars, the item that takes the longest to afford here is apples, at roughly 19 minutes of the average wage. Dollar prices and work-time prices often rank countries very differently — that gap is usually the more interesting number.
Play a puzzle
Japan comes up in the daily puzzle roughly once every 33 days, paired with a different item each time. Play today's puzzle or browse the archive of past rounds.