Yen really was the strongest currency in 1997

Watching this movie was a wild ride. An Asian crime epic, which manages to stay very personal. And these colors, I like the look of pre-digital movies. I had previously seen All About Lily Chou-Chou by the same director, but I liked Swallowtail Butterfly even more.

An interesting detail that draw my attention was the idea about Japanese yen being the strongest currency in the world and people from other countries wanting to get some yen. That was actually quite true in the late 1990s, yen really was very strong, I think 1997 was the highest point of the yen exchange rate. But that was not good for the Japanese economy, so they have tried to bring it down. The "yentown" is a fiction of course, but I think the writers of this movie were partly inspired by the actual faith of the Japanese currency. A movie about a currency - forex traders should love that!