Japan’s national debt burst through a zeros boundary last week to reach 1.02 quadrillion yen.
It has been difficult enough to translate Japanese financial numbers into familiar figures when they have been in the trillions. The only blessing now is that Japan, like much of the rest of the world these days, uses the American definitions for very large numbers rather than the British ones.
One quadrillion is thus a mere 1,000,000,000,000,000 – that is, one and 15 zeros. Under the British system it would be one and 24 zeros. Oh, and the Japanese debt is the equivalent of US$10 trillion.
