Yen: Bane of my finances

When I first came to Japan I thought that this little beast would be my downfall:

However, I have discovered since I have been here that it is not this 500 yen coin (scale is about right to the rest of the coins below) that is roughly the size of a quarter that dooms my finances so often. Allow me to show you the line up and you can try and guess. First the other coins:

From Left to Right: 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 yen

And now the bills:

From Top to Bottom: 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 yen

There is one coin and one bill that are the bane of my existence. Can you guess? I can tell you it's not the 2,000 yen bill, in fact I have not even seen one of these since I spent my last one. They just aren't used around here as near as I can tell. So the fiends that cause me to spend the most money randomly are the 100 yen coin, which is worth about $1.30 and is about the size of a nickle, it is so easy to just toss these into machines and get a drink. The other difficult one is the 1,000 yen bill. It is the lowest denomination bill and is therefore associated in my mind with $1 even though it is worth $13. I do not tend to carry many of the 5,000 and 10,000 yen bills because there are many places you can not use them easily, so I tend to break them as quickly as possible. My other problem is that with a budget of $100 a week I tend to think that it equates to 10,000 yen a week, wrong. This has caused me to spend almost 1,000 yen a day for food and some weeks spend almost 4,000 yen on fun, not to mention the roughly 2,000 yen a week I need for transportation. Out of everything in Japan I have adjusted to the value of the yen the slowest, making it one of the most difficult things I have had to deal with. When you grew up in a society where your first bill is the dollar and everything else is coins and then come to a society where the first bill is closer to ten dollars and the rest is in coins I am truly amazed I have not been spending more than two or three times more than I should in a given week. However, this is something I have to remind myself of every time I open my wallet.