name also appeared in Japan. While the Chinese eventually replaced with , the Japanese continued to use the same word, which was given the shinjitai form in reforms at the end of World War II. The spelling and pronunciation "yen" is standard in English because when Japan was first encountered by Europeans around the 16th century, Japanese () and () both had been pronounced and Portuguese missionaries had spelled them "ye". By the middle of the 18th century, and came to be pronounced as in modern Japanese, although some regions retain the pronunciation. Walter Henry Medhurst, who had neither been to Japan nor met any Japanese people, having consulted mainly a Japanese-Dutch dictionary, spelled some "e"s as "ye" in his An English and Japanese, and Japanese and English Vocabulary (1830). In the early Meiji era, James Curtis Hepburn, following Medhurst, spelled all "e"s as "ye" in his A Japanese and English dictionary (1867); in Japanese, e and i are slightly palatalized, somewhat as in Russian. That was the first full-scale Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionary, which had a strong influence on Westerners in Japan and probably prompted the spelling "yen". Hepburn revised most "ye"s to "e" in the 3rd edition (1886) to mirror the contemporary pronunciation, except "yen". Since 1946, the spelling "yen" is depicted on Japanese banknotes. History Introduction Ōkuma Shigenobu was in charge of Japan's fiscal and foreign policy in the early Meiji period, and he worked with Inoue Kaoru, Itō Hirobumi, and Shibusawa Eiichito run the Ministry of Finance, seeking to introduce a modern monetary system into Japan. Ōkuma proposed that coins, which were previously square, be made into circles, and that the names of the traditional currencies, ryō (両), bu (分) and shu (朱), be unified into yen (円), which was accepted by the government. On June 27, 1871, the Meiji government officially adopted the "yen" as Japan's modern unit of currency under the New Currency Act of 1871. While initially defined at par with the Spanish and Mexican dollars then circulating in the 19th century at 0.78 troy ounce (24.26 g) of fine silver, the yen was also defined as 1.5 grams of fine gold, considering recommendations to put the currency on the bimetallic standard. The Act also stipulated the adoption of the decimal accounting system of yen (1, ), (, ), and (, ), with the coins being round and manufactured using Western machinery acquired from Hong