When “real” stacks of paper money are piled up high and lined up in a row, they seem to lose their “real” value – even though they would, in reality, put almost anything you can imagine within your reach.
According to Morita, the stacks of bills, each worth 10 million yen, “seem
to become unreal in just five minutes.” What manifests itself instead is the shallow and ephemeral nature of humankind. Stripped of value, the billion yen in paper looms like the towering skyscrapers of Tokyo, or like a colossal wall, presenting different aspects to different viewers. Reduced to a mere
sequence of numerals, the stacked-up blocks of bills seem to be asking: what does value mean, anyway?