learning the value of money in my youth

I mentioned in a previous post that I had flown to Japan and back. I grew up as an army brat and lived in Japan in 1952 or so. Second grade, 7 or 8 years old I suppose. I was not overly supervised as a seven year old and ran with kids from my age to 11 or 12 years old. The Military community used a form of currency called script instead of American dollars. The script was all paper money including nickels dimes and quarters. The Japanese economy used Yen as they do today except, then the exchange rate was 360 yen to one dollar. The military ran free shuttle buses from the neighborhoods down to what would be called a mini-mall today, and then down to the Japanese business district and back. The point being, we kids could get just about anywhere for free. My first introduction to banking and money changing was based on free transportation and the exchange rate. The following process worked best right at the end of the month when the GI's and Sailors just got paid.

We would round up what script money we could get from our parents or find in our dads pants pockets and ride the bus down to the Japanese business district. We would approach a GI or sailor and hold out our script and say we needed yen to shop for toys because the local merchants couldn't accept script. An odd amount of money was best because it made the conversion more difficult even for well educated sailors. They would do their best to make it right but always gave more value than was accurate. We knew the right amount and would never let them short us.

Now we have a little more in yen than we had in script so we would ride the bus back to the PX (military WalMart) and find another GI to trade yen for script to spent in the PX because they would not accept Yen. The exchange woulld ALWAYS be in our favor and sometimes the GI's didn't even want our money, so we would haave both the Yen and script.

We would do this all day long but as we got more and more value we would only offer small amounts for trade because we wanted to look needy and cute instead of rich and manipulative. On a good payday weekend we could convert 50 or sixty cents into 5 0r ten dollars. It should be noted that we never cheated the troops. If they asked "how much is 50 cents worth in Yen?" we would tell them 180 and pro'ly get 200 anyway. Did I mention that I grew up to be a Banker?