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The dollar briefly fell to 84.82 yen — surpassing Thursday’s low and prompting the country’s finance minister, Hirohisa Fujii, to tell reporters in Tokyo Friday that he was “extremely nervous and watching the market carefully.”

“There’s no doubt the market has moved too far in one direction,” Mr. Fujii said. “Moves right now are extreme, and it would be possible to take appropriate measures.”

Although he did not explicitly say that the government might intervene in the foreign exchange markets — by buying dollars for yen — such comments are often interpreted as “verbal intervention,” in which comments from top policy makers can swing market expectations and thus influence currency levels.

By mid-morning in Tokyo, the dollar gained somewhat, to 85.90 yen, but it remains weak in comparison to earlier this year. In April, it took $1 bought 101 yen, and at the start of 2008, $1 bought nearly 110 yen.

The dollar’s slump against the yen, and against many of the world’s major currencies, is part of a wide, multiyear decline, set off by worries about the U.S. economy and its swelling debt — and more recently, a belief that the United States was unlikely to raise interest rates soon.

The dollar’s weakness is especially causing jitters in Japan, whose economy is still struggling to emerge from a deep recession. A strong yen — which makes exporters’ good more expensive for consumers in the United States — is something Japan’s export-oriented economy can ill afford.

The Nikkei 225 stock index in Tokyo dropped 1.8 percent on Friday morning, led by exporting giants like Sony, Toshiba, Toyota, Nissan and Honda.

Earlier this decade, Japan frequently intervened in currency markets to weaken its currency, thereby keeping its exports affordable for overseas markets.

But Japan has held back from similar moves amid increasing signals from Washington that Asia’s export-driven economies should no longer count on American consumers to keep them afloat.

In a research note on Friday, Patrick Bennett, a strategist at Société Générale in Hong Kong said he still expected “some ratcheting higher in tone before physical action is taken.”

On a recent trip to the region, President Obama urged countries like Japan and China to cultivate domestic demand instead, while allowing their currencies to appreciate against the dollar.

Mr. Obama is concerned by what economists call a global imbalance: a huge trade and current-account deficit in the United States and trade surpluses in the rest of the world. The president said Americans must spend less on imported goods — and increase their household savings — while consumers in Asia must spend more.

“It was just two weeks ago that U.S. President Obama stressed the necessity for the United States to reduce its trade deficit, and for Asian countries to grow domestic demand,” Osamu Takashima, an analyst at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, wrote in a note to clients. “International circumstances make it difficult for the Japanese government to halt the yen’s rise by intervening in currency markets.”

The slump in the dollar, so soon after Mr. Obama’s visit, is putting the Japanese government to the test, however. Japan has not meddled in currency markets since 2004, but the recent trend upward had prompted speculation that an intervention might be imminent.