Japanese Numbers Through “Energy” by Kuroki Ryo

Learning to understand numbers in Japanese intuitively has not been easy for me. The biggest challenge is that the groups of place values are handled differently when talking about large numbers. In English the place values are grouped in threes, while in Japanese the place values are grouped in fours. You can see what I’m talking about in the tables below.

English Number Arabic Numerals
One thousand 1,000
One million 1,000,000
One billion 1,000,000,000
Japanese Number Arabic Numerals
一万 (ichi man) 10,000
一億 (ichi oku) 100,000,000
一兆 (icchou) 1,000,000,000,000

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Japanese Book Review: トップ・レフト 都銀vs.米国投資銀行 – 黒木 亮

topleft(top left Togin vs. beikokutoushiginkou – Kuroki Ryo)

This is the second author I have read that writes business novels, so I can’t help but compare it to Ikeido Jun‘s works. Even though this is in the same genre, it is quite different. I’m excited that I can discover new things even within the seemingly narrow classification of business novels.

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Japanese Book Review: 下町ロケット  池井戸 潤

test(shitamachi roketto  Ikeido Jun)

This story centers around Tsukuda, who reluctantly takes over his father’s small engine business after failing as a rocket engine researcher. However, he keeps his dream alive pouring the company’s money into a rocket related side project and re-applying the results to small engines. When a large corporation needs Tsukuda’s technology to compete globally in the commercial rocket industry things get complicated.

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