How did some currencies come to operate in the hundreds or thousands?

Question

For instance the Japanese 100 yen converts to just 1 Australian dollar.

In: Economics

Answer 1

Something I didn’t see after a quick glance through the comments (which was admittedly pretty quick and surface level) is that some countries’ primary currencies don’t break up into other, smaller types of currency. Look at the US dollar. One dollar is one hundred cents. But the Japanese yen doesn’t break up in this way, so one yen is more like one US cent than one US dollar.