Salaries in USD

Well, the first thing to understand is the units. In English one would say "1-thousand" to mean 1,000, or "1-million" is 1,000,000. These would be the units for salaries in North America (USD). In Japanese 1-man is 10,000, and 1-oku is 100,000,000. These are the units for salaries in Japan (JPY).

Armed with an understanding of salary units, one can then apply simple base-10 multiplication to get the salary value as a big number. So 7,500-man would be 75,000,000 and 5.5-oku would be 550,000,000.

The final step in our Fun With Math segment is to divide that number by the current yen to dollar value. For example, when I first came to Japan the rate was 350 yen to $1.00, so 5.5-oku yen would have been $1,571,428.57. However, the last time I checked, $1.00 was worth only 97 yen, so that would make that same 5.5-oku salary worth $5,670,103.09. Granted, the yen rate doesn't fluctuate quite that much within a given year (as that's the difference over 27 years), but I think that it does a good job of showing that the dollar amount is variable.

While I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decided on a yen rate to use, many people opt for the 100 yen per $1.00 rate. This makes math very simple. 5.5-oku yen become 5-million USD. 7,500-man yen becomes 750-thousand USD.

Hope this helps.

That's what I was figuring but couldn't make out that last zero. I was thinking some players were only making around $500,000 that had been in the league a while.

Thanks sir!