Almost three years after it was issued in July 2000, I finally own a 2000 yen bank note. I have seen it a few times before, but I never held one. The note is not really circulated a lot and cannot be used in most vending machines. It was created by the late former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi to commemorate both the year 2000 and the Okinawa G8 summit. It depicts the Shureimon Gate in Naha, an Okinawan national symbol, on the front, and a scene from the 11th century novel Tale of Genji on the back, making it a beautiful bill. The first note issued is retained by the Japanese central bank for its currency museum, the second one was given to the Okinawa prefectural government, the third one to the family of Obuchi, who unfortunately did not live to see its birth. I now have numbers CA334535K and NA587462A.

I have decided I need to apply some of the more recent web technologies to this site. Cascading Style Sheets are widely supported now and as a first step I rewrote the layout to make use of them. The result should look almost identical as before (except for the dark blue background of the navigation bar not rendering all the way down). No more HTML tables to position elements !