Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining me today. I am pleased to be here in Oita, the home prefecture of the great thinker and educator of the Meiji era, Fukuzawa Yukichi, whom I admire a lot. The 10,000 yen Bank of Japan note has featured Fukuzawa's portrait since 1984. The Bank plans to issue a new series of banknotes around the first half of July 2024, but the current series will remain valid, and we will continue to see Fukuzawa notes in circulation. The 40 years we have spent with Fukuzawa notes have been a turbulent age. We witnessed an asset price boom in the late 1980s, its collapse in the early 1990s, ... (full story)