It’s a long time royal road for would-be millionaires to choose dentist as their occupation in Japan. Rather than becoming medical doctors, dentists were often thought as a shortcut to the rich.

Actually some decades ago, it was hard to find POOR dentists in Japan. However, it seems to have become a past legend of millionaire myth.

It’s said that dentists numbers are in oversupply situation especially in urban side or big cities.  Therefore the profit they earn is often  much less than the income of standard salaried workers.

1 out of 5 dentist are thought to be working under the annual income of 3,000,000 JPY or about 33000 UDS.  This is really unbelievable figure for us who know how the dentists were enjoying their life with luxury materials like expensive cars or deluxe houses.

That is why applicants for dental courses of Universities are becoming less and less every year, and 50% of the courses have want of applicants in  recent years.

I don’t always go for big gap of income among occupations, but dentists deal with human health or parts of human body, in this category probably the income for them also should be guaranteed at some proper level.   If a dentist needed to work with such low income, guarantee for the patient safety would be one of the anticipated matters.

I never imagined it would be like this for dentists…..when I was a student.

It’s a real surprise for many of Japanese businesses.  Today’s news says 1 dollar became equivalent to 83 JPY.  This seems the highest exchange rate for Japanese Yen to US dollar in the last 15 years.

Some or maybe many have suspected this high rate since the crash of American Economy by sub-prime loan crisis. Also some of them even expect much higher Japanese Yen rate, which means US dollar would be much weaker than ever if this negative anticipation would come true.

For us Japanese, strong Japanese Yen is not always good because the most of exporting businesses will be damaged much with the foreign exchange rate. The exporting companies will have to suffer from hard condition for outbound sales from Japan. Indeed, it’s better for people in traveling abroad as they can buy things cheaper in calculation with Japanese currency.

Looking at world economy, or American economy, probably this tendency would not stop and US dollar would be weaker and weaker. 

However,  it would mean a collapse of market economy or capitalism in a broader sense.  In that situation, currency or our daily money will mean different to us, or in a desperate way of thinking, money might have less value than the one we know now.

If so, what could be the next tool for exchanging the value ???