Instead, it's the dollar that has fallen, a trend that's sending shockwaves through corporate Japan. Take Honda Motor Co, Japan's No. 2 automaker, which last week said that each yen the dollar falls eats up ?14 billion (US$119 million) of operating profit.
The dollar, now changing hands above ?117, fell as low as ?115.96 in recent days. It was a seven-month low.
Things could get far worse. For the first time in years, Washington has a genuine reason to rethink its strong dollar policy.
"The very notion that the US now needs a strong currency when exporters are borderline survival in some sectors, is suddenly suspect," says David Gilmore, a partner at Foreign Exchange Analytics in Essex, Connecticut.
True, the US doesn't want capital racing out of its economy and markets. But then neither does Washington want to see loads of US manufacturers lining up for government bailouts or going bust.
Already, Washington has stepped up to save the airline industry. A softer dollar may provide a cushion for many companies, including American automakers.
If the US Treasury Department does begin favoring a weaker dollar, Japan's exporters would be in an extraordinary bind. Even before hijacked jets destroyed New York's World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon in Washington, Tokyo was having trouble lowering the yen.
Now that fears of a US recession and a change in dollar policy are ricocheting around markets, investors may have fewer incentives to buy dollars. The yen could surge as a result.
"The strength of the yen is coming at exactly the wrong time for the Japanese economy," explains Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at J.P. Morgan Securities (Asia) Ltd in Tokyo.
The trend is exacerbating deflationary pressures and contributing to the extraordinary weakness of Japanese stocks at a time when the nation already is in recession. That's complicating things for a Japan's troubled banking system.
Just as banks are working to write off mountains of bad loans, they're also moving to mark-to-market accounting techniques.
The change is expected to validate fears that many banks are insolvent.
Local governments will increasingly feel the pain. Taxes collected throughout Japan -- including from Tokyo's most affluent citizens and companies -- are redistributed in rural areas. Regional economies are even more heavily dependent on these funds than the public works projects that create jobs here in Hokkaido and just about everywhere else in the country.
If the yen makes exports less competitive and companies even less profitable than they are now, rural Japan could be in for some rough times.
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