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In the second season of Kaiji, one of the games he plays is an extreme
pachinko machine called "the Bog". There seems to be a counter on that game
which is confusing:

  * Inserting a 10 million yen card is shown to set that counter to 1000.
  * Pressing a button near that counter decreases that number by 100 and allows a large number of balls (it looks like 100) to fill the reservoir.
  * We are told many times that each ball costs 4,000 yen so buying a 10 million yen card would allow the player 2,500 balls.

If the counter shows how much money is left on the card, it is off by a factor
of 10,000. If the counter shows how many balls the card will still buy the
player, it should start at 2,500 instead of 1000. Everything seems to make
sense if we see the counter as showing 1/10,000 the amount of yen the player
has left on the card. That, however, seems a very strange way to denote that
amount of money. Am I missing something that would make that make sense?


CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-05T19:55:57.767
48687
2018-09-05T21:23:18.520
3561
question
kaiji
What does the number on the Bog's Counter mean in Kaiji?


Your confusion stems from the difference in the number systems used in English
and Japanese. Take a look at [this
chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals). Note that where
English would be ten thousand, Japanese has a word for that, 万 (man), and from
there starts to count similarly to the English "thousand": 10万, 100万, and...
1000万. So it would be a natural cutoff point on a display: Japanese people
would understand that the counter is cutting off five 0s.


CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-05T21:23:18.520
48689
2018-09-05T21:23:18.520
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answer