Japan's unprecedented spree of dollar-buying interventions pushed its foreign-exchange reserves to a record $741.25 billion as of the end of January.

The Finance Ministry said Friday the reserves, by far the biggest in the world, were up by $67.72 billion from a month earlier — the steepest rise yet for a single month.

Japan's currency-market interventions in 2003 totaled 20.43 trillion yen, the largest for a single year, it said. The previous record was 7.64 trillion yen, set in 1999.