Yen sinks to 34-year low

My condolences. It's crazy how much the dollar will take you in Japan. I'm getting meals at Co Co Ichibanya that would run me $30 in Koreantown LA for $6 here.

I guess there needs to be a balance between low value for driving exports and high value for making imports possible. Japan is an island nation, they need to import a lot of things to make their exports happen.

Their interest rate used to be <0%. To a first approximation that is worthless, there is almost no reason to buy Japanese government bonds. One Wiki page talking about 2013 [0] suggests that 70% of the bonds are purchased by the government itself and the remainder is mainly Japanese institutions that I would expect are legally compelled to (otherwise, why bother?).

I doubt the official Japanese interest rates are directly connected to the markets in a way that makes sense using traditional thinking. Most rational actors wouldn't be involved in a market where there is lots of downside and no real compensation. So the people involved aren't likely free to make rational decisions and all bets are off about what they do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_Japan

I just got 5.27% annualized on a 4 week US tbill while the Japanese 2 year is all the way up to 0.18% today.

Taking short term rates from negative to zero is just going to slow the bleeding a little. With these rate differentials this should be expected but it also might be a good place to long yen here but I am not a currency trader.

Just did can recommend

Definitely - just did this. Last trip was in 2019, when I got 110 Yen for my GBP. This trip, all the Yen denominated prices were essentially the same, but I got 180 Yen/GBP - so everything was nearly 50% cheaper, resulting in a much more luxurious (and enjoyable) trip