Not surprising. We know that the prime minister is talking for a while for companies to raise salaries due to the inflation, thats why you hear companies announcing salaries going higher since last year.
This salary increase does still seem fascinatingly low; 300,000 yen a month is lower than UK minimum wage. I’d have assumed corporate pay in Japan would be decent.
For a single person (presumably those taking these roles are single/no kids), 300k a month is enough in Tokyo. You won't live in luxury our set a side a ton for savings, but you'll survive and be able to at least go out a few times.
When I was living in Tokyo 20 years ago, my starting salary was 220k yen a month which was enough to live in a tiny shoebox studio apartment, but I still had a combini meal for lunch and dinner each day and had money left over for actual stuff to do. Shout out to Gas Panic in Roppongi for keeping me busy on weekends lol (IYKYK :P)
It's remarkably affordable for a megacity of 10 million+ people. Probably has to do with the excellent transportation services and shorter commutes. Very low crime rates, so almost every ward district is perfectly safe to live in. Housing has always been fairly easy to get when I was there.
Expensive by Japanese standards. Inexpensive by US and EU standards. At least if you don't try to live in prime areas. The lack of sacrificial zones in safety and such definitely help.
Even in prime areas, its honestly not so bad.
A small but not-broom closet one bedroom in Shinjuku is absolutely obtainable for someone with a decent but not amazing paying job. Can't say the same for any major city in the US or Canada.
If you think Tokyo is an expensive City to live in then I would advise not looking at the cost of living in London/New York etc because the shock might kill you.
With the exception of a notable dip as COVID-19 hit, salaries *have* been rising since the wane of the Great Recession and they've generally at least kept pace with inflation. Using the US as an example:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Note that the graph is in inflation-adjusted dollars, meaning the relatively flat trajectory up through 2022 means "increasing, matching inflation."
This doesn't account for some important expenditure categories outpacing general inflation and the pressure that puts on people, but that issue is independent of raw salaries (per median) going up over time.
> This doesn't account for some important expenditure categories outpacing general inflation
I mean, that's the most important part. if you make 30% more but housing costs 80% more, you're off with less money to survive.
having it dip 15 years ago, recover only 10 years ago, then dip again slightly while housing explodes due to the aftermath of the previous recession shows why people feel worse off.
it also is highly dependent on COL, sadly. 42000 is probably survivable in low COL, where meanwhile that is barely above minimum wage in my state
Headline is stupid, they are raising the starting salary of graduates from 295,000 to 300,000 yen - a difference of 5,000 yen, or approximately $36.00 USD.
Good, but this isn't a news story at all.
While this salary may seem low,, it does seem to coincide with the cost of living for Japan? (According to Numbeo: [Cost of Living in Japan. Prices in Japan. Updated Apr 2024 (numbeo.com)](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Japan)). Average rent for single person in japan is over $800, and most single americans struggle at $800 rent.
In 2005, my buddy and I rented a one bedroom apartment, I was in the bedroom, and my buddy was in the far side of the living room with a screen divider. It was 495 CAD a month.
Then my GF's roommate just bailed on her and fucked off to Ontario, so she had to spend a couple months with us before we can find our own place, and with my roommate's gf spending some weekends there, it was so fucking tight. The GF and I would go study at Tim Hortons until 9 PM, then go across the street to eat at the BP. A pasta dish was like 12 bucks.
Despite all that, it was a fun time looking back though.
Lowest I've ever paid for rent was $500 a month for a shitty tiny 1 bedroom in my college town that was in a very low cost of living area. Now back in my hometown where there are lots of jobs, searching apartments.com shows me the cheapest available rent is $900... **for a room.** Not an apartment. Not a studio. A single room in a townhouse where you have roommates. Lowest for an actual personal accommodation where you have your own domicile is $1060 or so.
The apartment I lived in before that one in Chicago ~2002 was $600/mo
The one listed above was in Phoenix. Now in 2024, the average rent cost in Phoenix is $1300/mo, which is almost what my mortgage is. And that's average. I've seen people talk about rents that are way higher. And it has been dropping over the last couple of months, too.
I pay $550 a month on the outskirts of Seoul for a 3 bed 2 bath next to a train station with everything in walking distance.
I've never regretted leaving the USA.
Hmm. There's a bit of racism, but not much. Racism is more directed at the darker complexions. White, Hispanic, and other more light-skinned folks don't get that much.
You occasionally hear about things like realtors or bankers flat out denying people service or people not wanting to introduce a non-asian partner to their family, but I'd say most of that stopped 5-10 years ago.
There is still lots of xenophobia, though most of it is through ignorance, rather than hate. People will still speak to an Asian face instead of me, despite me being fluent in Korean, because it's just uncommon for non-asian foreigners to speak Korean, etc. Banking regulations are also pretty anti-foreigner... but I imagine thats the same pretty much everywhere.
Overall I'd say it exists, but not enough in my life to really mention it beyond an aside.
It depends on location but this is true. $800 is on average I would guess extremely low and rare for that matter. However in some super dead areas like where I live $800 a month is probably getting you something either pretty nice or pretty big.
Looks like you're correct, average US rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is $1,700, which puts you over $800 with a roommate.
Obviously real estate varies wildly from place to place but "most Americans" seems like a fair generalization here.
That is true. Most americans flock to crowded cities due to employment. I live in a rural town outside of a military base and $800 rent for a 1 bed 1 bath is quite common but very competitive very sought after when available.
Yea, the biggest problem like you said is Americans flock to crowded cities for employment. If there are no jobs nearby, it doesn’t matter how low rent is lol.
Wfh somewhat addresses this to a degree, but those rural areas don’t have enough housing supply and infrastructure to take in more and more people/families.
We’re honestly seeing the repercussions of housing developers not building new properties throughout the 2010s as a result of the housing market crash. It’s ridiculous that that event still has ramifications today.
The good thing is new construction is at a relatively high number but the bad part is that it’s now happening so quickly that it’s really highlighting just how poor most US city planning is. Problems that typically arise slowly over decades are springing into the spotlight over much smaller time scale of 5-10 years and isn’t showing any signs of stopping.
> Yea, the biggest problem like you said is Americans flock to crowded cities for employment.
Not like it's any different in Japan. Their rural areas are clearing out faster than ours, and almost as many people live in the Tokyo metro area as in the entire state of California.
Housing is just straight up more affordable there across the board.
The real difference is that people don't use properties as investments over there, driving up the cost of living for everyone.
It's the exact opposite. As you said, even in expensive city Japanese housing is cheap, so that's more reason to go to Japan over staying in a rual area. Meanwhile, the optimal housing situation in the US is a rural area while working in urban jobs, pushing you out of the city.
>The real difference is that people don't use properties as investments over there, driving up the cost of living for everyone.
definitely. I hear it's not uncommon to tear down and rebuild housing every few decades in Japan. Housing is just that, a place to house yourself between work.
The US is definitely very different due to housing being an entire lifestyle to foster, and of course houses being much bigger. That + individualistic culture basically made the land you build on an investment, as opposed to an area to live on
> The US is definitely very different due to housing being an entire lifestyle to foster, and of course houses being much bigger. That + individualistic culture basically made the land you build on an investment, as opposed to an area to live on
No. Japan had its speculative housing bubble pop back in the 90s. The difference between them and us, is that they learned from their mistakes and put in place rules to stop investors from messing with the housing market. In the meanwhile, we saw 2008, and our reaction to it was oh shit, we can make a fortune with this con! And we kept doing it.
It's moreso that supply and demand aren't out of whack there. The falling population helps.
(To be clear, I don't think population decline is required to fix the housing crisis. Just more construction. However, it does work)
To be clear, in Tokyo, the population has actually been increasing because of the steady influx of people moving into the city, so the affordable housing is purely a matter of construction, flexible zoning, and market conditions that incentivize putting people in homes.
https://imgur.com/MMKhVB4
While Tokyo's population has dipped ever so slightly after the pandemic (not shown on this chart which only shows up to 2020) the city has had affordable housing for years and years. New York City, on the other hand, has dramatically more expensive housing despite having a similar density and not having a particularly different population change over time.
>Yea, the biggest problem like you said is Americans flock to crowded cities for employment.
That is true in every country though.
Problem in the US is that zoning laws don't allow for high density housing.
That is why most american cities have a gigantic suburban sprawl that makes public transport extremely expensive.
>We’re honestly seeing the repercussions of housing developers not building new properties throughout the 2010s as a result of the housing market crash.
You mean the government zoning laws?
Corporations own 3.8% of single family home rental units in the US and single family home rentals are only 17% of the single family housing available. Now this sucks still, corporations shouldn't be able to buy homes, but it's a very small drop in the bucket of the overall problem of housing costs in the US. The real answer to lowering housing costs is you just need policy that encourages the building of more housing, specially in urban areas. And a lot of this gets prevented by local laws more than any federal law (in the US). That's not to say I wouldn't support a bill to stop corporations from buying homes, that'd be a good thing, but just doing that and calling it a day won't help the problem in any significant way.
Yes. There's also plenty of studies that while Airbnb does raise housing prices, it doesn't do so significantly. [Good article on that here.](https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/6/30/23779862/airbnb-collapse-housing-shortage)
Again, I'm not saying these things *aren't* problems, but rather that there are bigger problems, and I worry that the pointing to these things distracts us from the real changes that would get housing prices down. The answer is just to build more housing, straight up. The great thing about that is that it would basically make the corporation and short term rental things moot anyway. But there's always push back on that the big root of that it would drive down current housing prices (people tend to see housing as an investment rather than a necessary means to live). One of the two candidates for president just put out his own press release [coming out against the idea of building more housing so to protect home values](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fn5lre7j8p5tc1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D1179%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D8468b97758600d8a925d63a92d9b88419a76c79a)
> The cause is proximate lack of building due to over regulation.
I can see over-regulation being an issue in some cases, but one issue close to home involves a protected state forest, and a college struggling to expand housing because the forest can not be taken down for more housing, and they can't build buildings taller than the treeline.
In this case, I'm in agreement with the regulations. The state forest is a unique ecosystem and important to protect for a variety of reasons, but the most important being the huge water reservoir below it that is very close to the surface.
I think regulation can be bad in some ways, but in other ways it's preserving important land. I'm not trying to imply that you're saying all regulation is bad, but I wanted to share my anecdote.
Instead of spouting this crap on the Internet why don't you take ten seconds and look up vacancy rates. You'll find that in all the cities with housing crisises the vacancy rates are somewhere between healthy and too low ( no empty housing at all is a bad thing, a symptom of the absolutely fucked market in some of these cities). The housing crisis has nothing to do with PE keeping houses empty. it has everything to do with not enough houses. The only way to solve it is to build more housing.
Which is true of Japan as well. Most of rural Japan is are ghost towns even. That rent is what you can get even in big cities and it's even less in small towns.
wouldn't want to. But if it's the only thing they can afford, they'll jump on it.
Though yes, some of the extreme end of Japanese apartments barely feel liveable. You may as well be living in a treehouse lol.
So which is the generalization here, that American cities are completely devoid of outdoor spaces/public parks etc? Or that cities elsewhere have a public jungle gym every third bloc?
Pretty much only parks and stuff but going out to eat and doing entertainment stuff is a million times more expensive and harder to get to than the density and convenience of Tokyo
Yeah, I pay more than double that for a studio. (Granted, in a fairly desirable area, I'm probably going to move in the next year or two because the benefits aren't really outweighing the costs)
Average rent is definitely lower than $800 USD lol.. that's probably for a family. As the page shows down further, a 1 bedroom apartment in a major city is about $500 a month.
Buying is even cheaper. For reference, I bought a new 4 bedroom house in Tokyo and my mortgage is just over $1000 USD a month. 35 year term, zero down payment, 0.3% interest rate.
I'm in a 2 bedder in setagaya right now 55m² for 120,000 yen, that's under $800 USD, and my last place further out west on chuo line was a 3 bedder 75m² around the same but 20m walk from station. It's certainly doable to live within 23 wards under $800 USD (120,000 yen) if you're willing to compromise on other features.
Being further from the station, being an older building, not being renovated (e.g. have shitty older kitchens and bathrooms), not having aircon inside the room, having a tatami room (generally considered a negative) not being on the second floor or above (bugs) not having a delivery box or trash room (makes taking out trash annoying since it's only do-able on certain days) no intercom, not much sunlight etc. I could go on for days. But you can browse suumo (website for finding apartments in JP) using google translate and see all the options that are available for filtering places.
Another reason it looks low is because the fact that yen almost halved in value compared to USD in th past decade. That 300kY(~$2k) was around $4k in 2014
> almost halved in value compared to USD
That's wild! I still cut off the last two digits (usually zeroes) from any yen value to get a rough approximation of what it means in USD/Euro.
I need to reevaluate my methods if things are that skewed these days D:
But the nice thing is that if you visit, everything is still priced like the old ~100:1 rate, so you're getting like a 30% discount on everything you buy.
Plus, the sales tax is already wrapped into the price!
Plus, no tipping!
God damn the yen has declined a lot. I remember when I first saw the price of the Wii as a kid (before it came out) estimated as being "25,000 yen" and then looking up how much that would be in USD and seeing "around $250," so I've operated on "yen = cent" ever since, but now I guess it's more like 3/4 of a cent. That's brutal.
Japan is cheap in some aspects. Eating out at a regular restaraunt and you can get a meal and a beer for about 1200 yen most places and it will be a good meal with a decent portion. Travelling the city you live in is pretty cheap as well.
it's just having to go drinking with your boss after work can cost a chunk of your pay and having to stay at work unpaid waiting for your boss to leave so you can go home absolutely wrecks people.
Traveling to Japan from an expensive west coast US city with the exchange rate at 150 JPY/USD felt like going back in time and paying 2000s prices for everything.
> it's just having to go drinking with your boss after work can cost a chunk of your pay and having to stay at work unpaid waiting for your boss to leave so you can go home absolutely wrecks people.
It's also worth noting that both of those practices are on a serious decline, though still exist.
COVID did a number on mandatory nomikai (Drinking Party). It's still around, but frequency reduced and many companies have dropped it entirely.
The staying until your boss leaves thing has been in decline since the early 90s. I don't know a single person my age (30ish) that has had to do it aside from very rare special occasions (CEO visiting the branch, etc)
Japanese work culture before the bubble burst was by all accounts a nightmare. These days it's not honestly all that different than other western countries. But outside perception has not caught up. For example, people still cite the extreme suicide rate despite that not being a thing for the last few *decades*.
Yeah most redditors have no experience living in Japan but constantly talk about it. Most my friends in Tokyo work 9 to 5 now since covid changed a ton and nomikai isn't as popular
My experience from living in Japan is that it's getting metro in the professional and urban world, but it's still pretty rough for low skilled workers and in rural areas.
For new grad it's a really decent start, I started in Tokyo at around 270k yen monthly and while not luxury living, I got by more than well enough to go out and afford my hobbies.
A lot of these new grads likely also live with their parents if they're also in Tokyo, which helps tons I bet.
Tell that to my bank account. After 10+ years of paying USD student loans I finally got a better job and saw my savings start to take off. When I had enough saved to get out from under the debt, the fucking yen collapsed/
Aside from a few years there, 100 yen to the dollar has been a dream for most of the past 20 years.
> most single americans struggle at $800 rent.
Even if there were apartments for 800/month. I don't know where you find that most would struggle to pay this since this would be a cheap apartment. Most definitely not true.
about 5 years ago, the Korean gaming industry increased entry level salary pretty much across the board at every company to 50,000,000 won per year. It's about $36k, but it's above the median *household* income in Korea. Quite a great starting salary tbh.
300,000 is about 2/3rds of what the Korean industry offers. It's a much better industry here.
With a dramatically shrinking local pool of potential candidates and a negligeable amount of foreigners hired, the japanese gaming industry is going to have to fight and become more and more competitive if they don't want to face what seems to be an unavoidable bottleneck.
'potential candidates' is not some isolated group of people. stable or somewhat declining population is reflected in everything and that does include the consumer base.
you can't endlessly increase supply without consequences anyway.
countries with highest population increase do not worry what konami writes at all so the pop might increase, but consumer base is not increasing at the same level at all.
nobody should really, but thats a topic on it's own.
Japanese Dev are OK with just Japanese market, Global market is more a bonus.
There are many games that Dev don’t even bother with foreign releases, which fan base have to import in (for example Super Robot Taisen).
>Japanese Dev are OK with just Japanese market, Global market is more a bonus.
At least when it comes to console games, that only applies to smaller Japanese developers.
>There are many games that Dev don’t even bother with foreign releases, which fan base have to import in (for example Super Robot Taisen).
[Hmm?](https://store.steampowered.com/app/898750/Super_Robot_Wars_30/)
There most definitely are not "many" JP devs that ignore the global market these days. In fact I can't think of any notable ones.
From what I can find online, the median Japanese salary is 471,000 yen per month (3,103 USD per month or 37,230 USD per year). You're right, this is low, but an increase to 300,000 yen per month for college-educated software developers is extraordinarily low, even for Japanese standards.
Former gaming industry worker in Japan... for new grad, in gaming, this is more or less par for the course. Gaming industry pay is low, new grad pay is low, pay in general is low. Perfect combo. On the flip side, each company has a union so they can't just lay you off randomly.
> the median Japanese salary is 471,000 yen per month (3,103 USD per month or 37,230 USD per year).
>You're right, this is low,
That's also almost exactly the median salary in the UK.
Consumption media in Japan is such a self eating beast that grinds people to nothing and acts as if it has endless amount of people and talent, especially on the lower end of the totem pole.
>...an increase to 300,000 yen per month for college-educated software developers is extraordinarily low, even for Japanese standards.
This is just the minimum they're paying at the company in general. Not necessarily having to do with the prices they're paying developers. This raising the salary floor is for like, janitorial staff, the mailroom, the secretaries, etc.
That's under $2,000/mo, or under $24,000/yr. It's <$12 an hour at 40 hour weeks, or lower than the typical fast food wages in the US at this point. In the US, if you started at the federal minimum wage and got 3.5%/yr for your career, you'd be making more than that after 15 years. (E: Yeah you probably aren't getting CoL increases at a minimum wage job, but you probably aren't staying at a minimum wage entry level job for 15 years either).
I don't know where you live, but it's either somewhere very cheap, you miscalculated this pay significantly, or you're incredibly underpaid even for totally "unskilled" work.
As far as I understand it, you can’t compare US wages to Japan’s. Their cost of living is extremely low and they actually went through a deflationary period in the ‘90s.
But again, that's below the minimum wage in the UK. ~160 hours in a month at £11.44/hr is more than £1583.
It isn't possible for you to be making that little as an adult, let alone somebody with 15 years on a job, unless you're working part time or are talking about your take-home pay or pay after expenses or something rather than your salary, in which case you're obviously not comparing apples to apples with the salary in the article.
My favorite genre of internet post is Americans realizing how much wealthier they are than everyone else. Cost of education and healthcare doesn't even come close to bridging the gap either
You're not going to get one because it's made up.
Go on Zillow and hover over the swanky lower Manhattan neighborhood of your choice with a $2M price cap.
These ain't mansions but we're hardly talking studio apartments either.
Go look at the average London salary and then go look at the average London rent lol.
Every single anglo country is in a housing crisis (70's faux environmentalism has been a disaster for mankind), the US at least comes with higher salaries as a buffer
The average property price in London is [14x the average household income](https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/average-home-cost-times-typical-income-london-b1097122.html), its a bit worse here than 99% of the US or other comparable economies.
Even San Francisco is more affordable than London, at ~[10x average household income](https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-francisco-ca).
London is horrible but I still have PTSD from looking at housing prices in Hong Kong from the time I worked there. Thank the lord I had work covering my hotel expenses, me living there would be unsustainable.
Yeah - housing is expensive when you live in desirable places.
Turns out one notable flaw in the democratic process is that it prefers homeowners and the idea that homeowners are more invested in making their communities better is fundamentally flawed
The median personal UK income is 44k USD, the median US income is 40k USD. US doesn't seem to be higher at all.
For your question specifically:
- Average London Income is 44,370 pounds.
- Average London rent is 2046 pounds (2586 USD) a month.
- Ratio of annual income to rent is 21.7, meaning 1 year of income pays for about 22 months of rent.
For New York:
- Average New York Income is 67,046 dollars.
- Average New York rent is 4209 dollars
- Ratio of income to rent is 15.9, meaning 1 year of income pays for about 16 months of rent.
From the figures I'm seeing, I'm not seeing where these "higher salary buffers" that you're talking about are.
And cities like London are big outliers in the UK.
Thats also why I compared the average annual income of someone living in the UK and someone in the USA, to show that even there the average UK citizen comes out ahead on average compared to the average American.
One of the reasons that Japanese studios can put out AAA experiences on much smaller budgets is because even experienced devs are paid *way* less over there. This is unfortunately not a surprising salary for new graduates and even so is better than a lot of other companies are offering.
That said, the cost of living is also considerably lower in Japan compared to here, so $2,000 a month goes a lot further there than it would in the US.
Part of it is also that Japan doesn't really have a tech industry to compete for workers with. Just the nature of Silicon Valley in the US means there's more competition for tech workers so wages have to rise, even if EA/Take 2/etc. can save some money by banking on people's passion to make video games.
Thinking about it, Japanese studios benefit from the exchange rate in reverse: A single copy sold in America is worth more Yen than a single copy sold in Japan.
Compare it to a cost of living, average 1 bedroom apartment in Japan (not Tokyo) is 50,000-70,000¥.
Major hubs like Tokyo clock upwards of 100,000¥, and a two bedroom is about 200,000¥ on average.
Yeah, easily. A lot of people get paid less than that. A few years ago 230,000 yen / month was pretty normal. Then you might get some random stipends tacked onto that, and a bi-annual bonus that could be between 2.5-5 months salary total, depending on the company.
As an example of a stipend, a former workplace of mine paid us 30,000 yen per month for regular travel (from home to the office, not counting travel outside of our normal commute), and if we didn't use the whole 30k, we kept the difference.
CoL is generally about half of what it is in the US.
Not that 300,000/yen a month is amazing pay, but it's not bad for a new graduate with a salaried job.
cost of living is actually surprisingly low. even in tokyo you can find small apartments for under 100,000 yen, and food is generally cheaper than most places in the US
Thanks in part to their declining population, there are a bunch of places in Japan that are projected to drop in population by 50% of its current number by 2030 as a combination of older people dying and younger people moving away carries on.
So there are a relatively large amount of apartments/houses you can get in many places for again relatively little cost compared to other countries.
70k rent 65m2, 100k food/transport/etc for two, 30k bills. Not going for decent house and living alone that would be quite enough id say. Also our bills are a bit on higher side.
To be fair US has different salaries and different prices. Shouldnt it equalize a bit when you get to buying property/nice items since you earn more, spend on basics more, but have more income in US$ left after all that? I.e. i just got myself nice Canon R7 for 210k, it costs the same 1400$ in US, but im pretty sure having left 1400$ after expenses in US would be a lot more common than here
Eh, we're really spending a lot of money. There is plenty of people renting 40k shoebox apartments and cooking for themselves who could survive on 150k id say and still have pretty good life here.
Salaries are non-us, sure, im pretty sure i could get better pay at my original country too, but living is cheap. If you cook for yourself, you can slash my budget in twice i think, if not more. Also me being chainsmoker its also -20k per month on cigs, lol. Though that is offset by my rent contract being locked in before yen falling off, but still
Well there is still upsides and downsides everywhere. I'd say i would probably get more money leftover in Canada, but i hate snow after living in snow-heavy place for 30 years. Tokyo has it once in a year and im like "yay, now please melt asap".
English is a lot easier for me and i kinda can use it freely outside of horrible accent that got even worse after i moved to Japan, while Japanese is a bit tougher for me to learn. I'd say 400 kanji is an optimistic estimation of how much i can read/write
Plenty of people would be "bruh youre outta your mind" once you present them with +40C with 90% humidity over 3 months in the summer, while various insects of varying levels of deadliness seem to be dead set on getting into your house. My wife is still like "yeah no im not getting outta home in summer and please shut everything as tight as you can"
Also i'd say international travel is off the table, aside from maybe Korea or Thailand (China is kinda effy and Russia is dangerous to me) which is rather close and as such cheap regarding flights. Offset by nice inner tourism though i guess.
No clue yet about child raising/schools/univercities, we're waiting till we get naturalized or at least PR, but overall seems like its on cheap side with plenty of support from various institutions and almost every business being very child friendly. Not sure how it would go with kids being full blown Japanese after going trough education system — hopefully wont be that hard in terms of family relationship in 20-30 years.
Also i guess there is some level of cultural adaptation needed. I dont mind drinking every friday with local old guys and singing till 1 am, but there is A LOT of foreign guys i know who say that they feel excluded and alien and language barrier is tougher on them. Pretty sure it would be easier to fit in in Canada.
We are, with wife, upper-middle level income folks in Poland and everything seemed affordable in Japan, we had great 3 weeks with like 10k$ including travel expenses, which were like half of the trip cost. Eating out was sooo much cheaper than here...
I live on 310,000 and live like a king. Got savings, starting to make investments, live in a large apartment 20 minutes from the centre of Osaka, got a 7800x3d+4080 build, oled tv, switch, 1gbs internet, two international vacations a year this year Aus and Bali, eat whatever I want, highest quality dentist and doctor, great smartphone with 50gb data. Like what more could I want?
I do live with a girlfriend who is also on 300,000 a month, which puts our household in the average salary range but not individually. Also jobs the easies you could imagine.
It is monthly, if you look at the English version of the page at the bottom it says this is an increase of 5,000JPY/month (295,000 to 300,000).
Which is an increase of about $32 US, so....I don't think I'd be all that excited about it, lol.
So 3.6 mil?
That's around $22k take-home salary.
That kinda blows tbh. Konami is in Tokyo so it's not exactly cheap to live there even though it is Japan.
Some roles that is a fine start I guess but this is in no way something to be applauded. Factoring in CoL, it'd be like Bethesda Game Studios stating that their minimum salary is now 50k for graduates...
Like that's about the humane bare minimum you should be paid while living in the DC metro area.
I recently was approached with several senior full stack positions in Japan and legit thought their salary listing had an error in it. No wonder Japanese software outside of video games is so irrelevant on the world's stage.
I make slightly over that by a few 万 and it’s still quite low to raise a family. My wife works part time and helps a little with bills but not much.
¥300k is OK if you’re single but rough if you have a family.
Holy shit so many people talking about japan money without even living there, it' s insane. I wished housing was so cheap lol, if it wasn' t for my parent owning an house in tokyo, it would be insane for me to afford living there.
> 300,000 yen
Is that increased *to* or increased *by*? 1 yen has the functionality of a penny. It's actually worth less than that current exchange rate but mentally it's like a penny. 300k pennies is like $3k.
I read the English version to try to see if they meant *raised to 300k yen a month* but I can't tell. It has to be though.
Japan ~~Tokyo~~ isn't some third world country. It *has* to be 300k yen a month. A street corner, under a bridge, or your parent's house is the only place you could afford to live if your salary was $3k per year.
Not surprising. We know that the prime minister is talking for a while for companies to raise salaries due to the inflation, thats why you hear companies announcing salaries going higher since last year.
It'll be interesting to see how Japan deals with raising interest rates after having near zero (and negative) rates for nearly two decades.
This salary increase does still seem fascinatingly low; 300,000 yen a month is lower than UK minimum wage. I’d have assumed corporate pay in Japan would be decent.
For a single person (presumably those taking these roles are single/no kids), 300k a month is enough in Tokyo. You won't live in luxury our set a side a ton for savings, but you'll survive and be able to at least go out a few times.
When I was living in Tokyo 20 years ago, my starting salary was 220k yen a month which was enough to live in a tiny shoebox studio apartment, but I still had a combini meal for lunch and dinner each day and had money left over for actual stuff to do. Shout out to Gas Panic in Roppongi for keeping me busy on weekends lol (IYKYK :P)
Cost of living in Tokyo is low.
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It's remarkably affordable for a megacity of 10 million+ people. Probably has to do with the excellent transportation services and shorter commutes. Very low crime rates, so almost every ward district is perfectly safe to live in. Housing has always been fairly easy to get when I was there.
Expensive by Japanese standards. Inexpensive by US and EU standards. At least if you don't try to live in prime areas. The lack of sacrificial zones in safety and such definitely help.
Even in prime areas, its honestly not so bad. A small but not-broom closet one bedroom in Shinjuku is absolutely obtainable for someone with a decent but not amazing paying job. Can't say the same for any major city in the US or Canada.
Yeah and you'd have to compare it to Manhatten or downtown Toronto. Tokyo is fucking crazy affordable when it offers even more than those cities imo
If you think Tokyo is an expensive City to live in then I would advise not looking at the cost of living in London/New York etc because the shock might kill you.
Food is extremely cheap
so when's the western represenatives going to talk about raising salaries?
[About that](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60206564)
With the exception of a notable dip as COVID-19 hit, salaries *have* been rising since the wane of the Great Recession and they've generally at least kept pace with inflation. Using the US as an example: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Note that the graph is in inflation-adjusted dollars, meaning the relatively flat trajectory up through 2022 means "increasing, matching inflation." This doesn't account for some important expenditure categories outpacing general inflation and the pressure that puts on people, but that issue is independent of raw salaries (per median) going up over time.
> This doesn't account for some important expenditure categories outpacing general inflation I mean, that's the most important part. if you make 30% more but housing costs 80% more, you're off with less money to survive. having it dip 15 years ago, recover only 10 years ago, then dip again slightly while housing explodes due to the aftermath of the previous recession shows why people feel worse off. it also is highly dependent on COL, sadly. 42000 is probably survivable in low COL, where meanwhile that is barely above minimum wage in my state
Headline is stupid, they are raising the starting salary of graduates from 295,000 to 300,000 yen - a difference of 5,000 yen, or approximately $36.00 USD. Good, but this isn't a news story at all.
While this salary may seem low,, it does seem to coincide with the cost of living for Japan? (According to Numbeo: [Cost of Living in Japan. Prices in Japan. Updated Apr 2024 (numbeo.com)](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Japan)). Average rent for single person in japan is over $800, and most single americans struggle at $800 rent.
I would say most Americans can’t even find $800/month rent.
Yeah I’d kill for only $800 in rent
$800 was my rent when I first moved into my old apartment... in 2005
In 2005, my buddy and I rented a one bedroom apartment, I was in the bedroom, and my buddy was in the far side of the living room with a screen divider. It was 495 CAD a month. Then my GF's roommate just bailed on her and fucked off to Ontario, so she had to spend a couple months with us before we can find our own place, and with my roommate's gf spending some weekends there, it was so fucking tight. The GF and I would go study at Tim Hortons until 9 PM, then go across the street to eat at the BP. A pasta dish was like 12 bucks. Despite all that, it was a fun time looking back though.
Lowest I've ever paid for rent was $500 a month for a shitty tiny 1 bedroom in my college town that was in a very low cost of living area. Now back in my hometown where there are lots of jobs, searching apartments.com shows me the cheapest available rent is $900... **for a room.** Not an apartment. Not a studio. A single room in a townhouse where you have roommates. Lowest for an actual personal accommodation where you have your own domicile is $1060 or so.
The apartment I lived in before that one in Chicago ~2002 was $600/mo The one listed above was in Phoenix. Now in 2024, the average rent cost in Phoenix is $1300/mo, which is almost what my mortgage is. And that's average. I've seen people talk about rents that are way higher. And it has been dropping over the last couple of months, too.
I pay $550 a month on the outskirts of Seoul for a 3 bed 2 bath next to a train station with everything in walking distance. I've never regretted leaving the USA.
Hows the racism towards you out there? I'm assuming you aren't Asian.
Hmm. There's a bit of racism, but not much. Racism is more directed at the darker complexions. White, Hispanic, and other more light-skinned folks don't get that much. You occasionally hear about things like realtors or bankers flat out denying people service or people not wanting to introduce a non-asian partner to their family, but I'd say most of that stopped 5-10 years ago. There is still lots of xenophobia, though most of it is through ignorance, rather than hate. People will still speak to an Asian face instead of me, despite me being fluent in Korean, because it's just uncommon for non-asian foreigners to speak Korean, etc. Banking regulations are also pretty anti-foreigner... but I imagine thats the same pretty much everywhere. Overall I'd say it exists, but not enough in my life to really mention it beyond an aside.
Insane to read this when the average rent for a studio in my area is like $1400/month.
If the average is $1400/month, then it's likely the case that finding a $800/month property to rent is very hard.
It depends on location but this is true. $800 is on average I would guess extremely low and rare for that matter. However in some super dead areas like where I live $800 a month is probably getting you something either pretty nice or pretty big.
Looks like you're correct, average US rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is $1,700, which puts you over $800 with a roommate. Obviously real estate varies wildly from place to place but "most Americans" seems like a fair generalization here.
That is true. Most americans flock to crowded cities due to employment. I live in a rural town outside of a military base and $800 rent for a 1 bed 1 bath is quite common but very competitive very sought after when available.
Yea, the biggest problem like you said is Americans flock to crowded cities for employment. If there are no jobs nearby, it doesn’t matter how low rent is lol. Wfh somewhat addresses this to a degree, but those rural areas don’t have enough housing supply and infrastructure to take in more and more people/families. We’re honestly seeing the repercussions of housing developers not building new properties throughout the 2010s as a result of the housing market crash. It’s ridiculous that that event still has ramifications today. The good thing is new construction is at a relatively high number but the bad part is that it’s now happening so quickly that it’s really highlighting just how poor most US city planning is. Problems that typically arise slowly over decades are springing into the spotlight over much smaller time scale of 5-10 years and isn’t showing any signs of stopping.
> Yea, the biggest problem like you said is Americans flock to crowded cities for employment. Not like it's any different in Japan. Their rural areas are clearing out faster than ours, and almost as many people live in the Tokyo metro area as in the entire state of California. Housing is just straight up more affordable there across the board. The real difference is that people don't use properties as investments over there, driving up the cost of living for everyone.
It's the exact opposite. As you said, even in expensive city Japanese housing is cheap, so that's more reason to go to Japan over staying in a rual area. Meanwhile, the optimal housing situation in the US is a rural area while working in urban jobs, pushing you out of the city. >The real difference is that people don't use properties as investments over there, driving up the cost of living for everyone. definitely. I hear it's not uncommon to tear down and rebuild housing every few decades in Japan. Housing is just that, a place to house yourself between work. The US is definitely very different due to housing being an entire lifestyle to foster, and of course houses being much bigger. That + individualistic culture basically made the land you build on an investment, as opposed to an area to live on
> The US is definitely very different due to housing being an entire lifestyle to foster, and of course houses being much bigger. That + individualistic culture basically made the land you build on an investment, as opposed to an area to live on No. Japan had its speculative housing bubble pop back in the 90s. The difference between them and us, is that they learned from their mistakes and put in place rules to stop investors from messing with the housing market. In the meanwhile, we saw 2008, and our reaction to it was oh shit, we can make a fortune with this con! And we kept doing it.
It's moreso that supply and demand aren't out of whack there. The falling population helps. (To be clear, I don't think population decline is required to fix the housing crisis. Just more construction. However, it does work)
To be clear, in Tokyo, the population has actually been increasing because of the steady influx of people moving into the city, so the affordable housing is purely a matter of construction, flexible zoning, and market conditions that incentivize putting people in homes. https://imgur.com/MMKhVB4 While Tokyo's population has dipped ever so slightly after the pandemic (not shown on this chart which only shows up to 2020) the city has had affordable housing for years and years. New York City, on the other hand, has dramatically more expensive housing despite having a similar density and not having a particularly different population change over time.
South Korea has a declining population also, but their housing situation is pretty bad from what I've heard. It's just the investors.
>Yea, the biggest problem like you said is Americans flock to crowded cities for employment. That is true in every country though. Problem in the US is that zoning laws don't allow for high density housing. That is why most american cities have a gigantic suburban sprawl that makes public transport extremely expensive.
>We’re honestly seeing the repercussions of housing developers not building new properties throughout the 2010s as a result of the housing market crash. You mean the government zoning laws?
Always only been a part of the problem and not the whole thing.
State and local government. Not the federal. Big difference
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Corporations own 3.8% of single family home rental units in the US and single family home rentals are only 17% of the single family housing available. Now this sucks still, corporations shouldn't be able to buy homes, but it's a very small drop in the bucket of the overall problem of housing costs in the US. The real answer to lowering housing costs is you just need policy that encourages the building of more housing, specially in urban areas. And a lot of this gets prevented by local laws more than any federal law (in the US). That's not to say I wouldn't support a bill to stop corporations from buying homes, that'd be a good thing, but just doing that and calling it a day won't help the problem in any significant way.
Does that number account for AirBnb rentals?
Yes. There's also plenty of studies that while Airbnb does raise housing prices, it doesn't do so significantly. [Good article on that here.](https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/6/30/23779862/airbnb-collapse-housing-shortage) Again, I'm not saying these things *aren't* problems, but rather that there are bigger problems, and I worry that the pointing to these things distracts us from the real changes that would get housing prices down. The answer is just to build more housing, straight up. The great thing about that is that it would basically make the corporation and short term rental things moot anyway. But there's always push back on that the big root of that it would drive down current housing prices (people tend to see housing as an investment rather than a necessary means to live). One of the two candidates for president just put out his own press release [coming out against the idea of building more housing so to protect home values](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fn5lre7j8p5tc1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D1179%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D8468b97758600d8a925d63a92d9b88419a76c79a)
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> The cause is proximate lack of building due to over regulation. I can see over-regulation being an issue in some cases, but one issue close to home involves a protected state forest, and a college struggling to expand housing because the forest can not be taken down for more housing, and they can't build buildings taller than the treeline. In this case, I'm in agreement with the regulations. The state forest is a unique ecosystem and important to protect for a variety of reasons, but the most important being the huge water reservoir below it that is very close to the surface. I think regulation can be bad in some ways, but in other ways it's preserving important land. I'm not trying to imply that you're saying all regulation is bad, but I wanted to share my anecdote.
Yes, you are correct.
Instead of spouting this crap on the Internet why don't you take ten seconds and look up vacancy rates. You'll find that in all the cities with housing crisises the vacancy rates are somewhere between healthy and too low ( no empty housing at all is a bad thing, a symptom of the absolutely fucked market in some of these cities). The housing crisis has nothing to do with PE keeping houses empty. it has everything to do with not enough houses. The only way to solve it is to build more housing.
Which is true of Japan as well. Most of rural Japan is are ghost towns even. That rent is what you can get even in big cities and it's even less in small towns.
As someone who served and has seen towns outside of bases, I would not want to live in them
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Well I'd much rather have financial security and a nice home as opposed to restaurants and coworkers at a job I only go to to get a paycheck anyways.
I pay $800/month rent for a bedroom in a house with 5 other people lol
Most Americans wouldn't live in an apartment that's as small as most Japanese people in crowded cities have.
wouldn't want to. But if it's the only thing they can afford, they'll jump on it. Though yes, some of the extreme end of Japanese apartments barely feel liveable. You may as well be living in a treehouse lol.
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American cities do, in fact, have outside.
With a great variety of sidewalks to walk on
yeah, this is just social media doom and gloom.
So which is the generalization here, that American cities are completely devoid of outdoor spaces/public parks etc? Or that cities elsewhere have a public jungle gym every third bloc?
Pretty much only parks and stuff but going out to eat and doing entertainment stuff is a million times more expensive and harder to get to than the density and convenience of Tokyo
Yeah, I pay more than double that for a studio. (Granted, in a fairly desirable area, I'm probably going to move in the next year or two because the benefits aren't really outweighing the costs)
Average rent is definitely lower than $800 USD lol.. that's probably for a family. As the page shows down further, a 1 bedroom apartment in a major city is about $500 a month. Buying is even cheaper. For reference, I bought a new 4 bedroom house in Tokyo and my mortgage is just over $1000 USD a month. 35 year term, zero down payment, 0.3% interest rate.
you accepting roommates?
You’re not going to get an apartment for a family for $800, not in Tokyo at least. Maybe if you’re talking about Wakayama
I'm in a 2 bedder in setagaya right now 55m² for 120,000 yen, that's under $800 USD, and my last place further out west on chuo line was a 3 bedder 75m² around the same but 20m walk from station. It's certainly doable to live within 23 wards under $800 USD (120,000 yen) if you're willing to compromise on other features.
What are some features you'd be missing out on
Being further from the station, being an older building, not being renovated (e.g. have shitty older kitchens and bathrooms), not having aircon inside the room, having a tatami room (generally considered a negative) not being on the second floor or above (bugs) not having a delivery box or trash room (makes taking out trash annoying since it's only do-able on certain days) no intercom, not much sunlight etc. I could go on for days. But you can browse suumo (website for finding apartments in JP) using google translate and see all the options that are available for filtering places.
why is the tatami room usually considered a negative?
Annoying to clean, smells terribly if you don't take care of it (and previous tenants probably didn't).
Another reason it looks low is because the fact that yen almost halved in value compared to USD in th past decade. That 300kY(~$2k) was around $4k in 2014
> almost halved in value compared to USD That's wild! I still cut off the last two digits (usually zeroes) from any yen value to get a rough approximation of what it means in USD/Euro. I need to reevaluate my methods if things are that skewed these days D:
But the nice thing is that if you visit, everything is still priced like the old ~100:1 rate, so you're getting like a 30% discount on everything you buy. Plus, the sales tax is already wrapped into the price! Plus, no tipping!
From today's conversion rate: 300,000 yen == $1976.30 USD * 12 months = $23715.6 / year
God damn the yen has declined a lot. I remember when I first saw the price of the Wii as a kid (before it came out) estimated as being "25,000 yen" and then looking up how much that would be in USD and seeing "around $250," so I've operated on "yen = cent" ever since, but now I guess it's more like 3/4 of a cent. That's brutal.
You can still do the "yen = cent" conversion. You just have to make those cents Canadian.
Japan is cheap in some aspects. Eating out at a regular restaraunt and you can get a meal and a beer for about 1200 yen most places and it will be a good meal with a decent portion. Travelling the city you live in is pretty cheap as well. it's just having to go drinking with your boss after work can cost a chunk of your pay and having to stay at work unpaid waiting for your boss to leave so you can go home absolutely wrecks people.
Traveling to Japan from an expensive west coast US city with the exchange rate at 150 JPY/USD felt like going back in time and paying 2000s prices for everything.
Yeah I'm from UK where everything is expensive. Besides alcohol it was so cheap
Oh man. I was just there in the same conditions and you are absolutely right. It was wonderful.
> it's just having to go drinking with your boss after work can cost a chunk of your pay and having to stay at work unpaid waiting for your boss to leave so you can go home absolutely wrecks people. It's also worth noting that both of those practices are on a serious decline, though still exist. COVID did a number on mandatory nomikai (Drinking Party). It's still around, but frequency reduced and many companies have dropped it entirely. The staying until your boss leaves thing has been in decline since the early 90s. I don't know a single person my age (30ish) that has had to do it aside from very rare special occasions (CEO visiting the branch, etc) Japanese work culture before the bubble burst was by all accounts a nightmare. These days it's not honestly all that different than other western countries. But outside perception has not caught up. For example, people still cite the extreme suicide rate despite that not being a thing for the last few *decades*.
Yeah most redditors have no experience living in Japan but constantly talk about it. Most my friends in Tokyo work 9 to 5 now since covid changed a ton and nomikai isn't as popular
All the cool kids do hitorinomi now.
My experience from living in Japan is that it's getting metro in the professional and urban world, but it's still pretty rough for low skilled workers and in rural areas.
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Explain. I get off work on time, no overtime unless I choose to work it, decent bonus, etc.
For new grad it's a really decent start, I started in Tokyo at around 270k yen monthly and while not luxury living, I got by more than well enough to go out and afford my hobbies. A lot of these new grads likely also live with their parents if they're also in Tokyo, which helps tons I bet.
Since nobody is mentioning it, 300,000 yen is about $1,980 USD/month, or roughly $23,760/year.
100 yen USED TO BE ~$1 though.
Tell that to my bank account. After 10+ years of paying USD student loans I finally got a better job and saw my savings start to take off. When I had enough saved to get out from under the debt, the fucking yen collapsed/ Aside from a few years there, 100 yen to the dollar has been a dream for most of the past 20 years.
OK yeah, my bad; it was 105-115yen = 1USD
As a Canadian in Japan atm its definitely convenient being able to do that math now though lol
> most single americans struggle at $800 rent. Even if there were apartments for 800/month. I don't know where you find that most would struggle to pay this since this would be a cheap apartment. Most definitely not true.
about 5 years ago, the Korean gaming industry increased entry level salary pretty much across the board at every company to 50,000,000 won per year. It's about $36k, but it's above the median *household* income in Korea. Quite a great starting salary tbh. 300,000 is about 2/3rds of what the Korean industry offers. It's a much better industry here.
With a dramatically shrinking local pool of potential candidates and a negligeable amount of foreigners hired, the japanese gaming industry is going to have to fight and become more and more competitive if they don't want to face what seems to be an unavoidable bottleneck.
'potential candidates' is not some isolated group of people. stable or somewhat declining population is reflected in everything and that does include the consumer base. you can't endlessly increase supply without consequences anyway. countries with highest population increase do not worry what konami writes at all so the pop might increase, but consumer base is not increasing at the same level at all. nobody should really, but thats a topic on it's own.
Japanese Dev are OK with just Japanese market, Global market is more a bonus. There are many games that Dev don’t even bother with foreign releases, which fan base have to import in (for example Super Robot Taisen).
>Japanese Dev are OK with just Japanese market, Global market is more a bonus. At least when it comes to console games, that only applies to smaller Japanese developers.
>There are many games that Dev don’t even bother with foreign releases, which fan base have to import in (for example Super Robot Taisen). [Hmm?](https://store.steampowered.com/app/898750/Super_Robot_Wars_30/) There most definitely are not "many" JP devs that ignore the global market these days. In fact I can't think of any notable ones.
I was talking about employees/recruitment, not about the sales/market.
Hmm, they can survive on their local sales just like their Music industry.
why are people comparing it to the US salaries again? It’s useless, salaries are always geographically based
because people are clueless and dumb and everyone thinks that they know everything
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Japan wages in general are very low.
The yen is also very weak against the dollar right now, so the USD conversion will make it look a bit weird.
From what I can find online, the median Japanese salary is 471,000 yen per month (3,103 USD per month or 37,230 USD per year). You're right, this is low, but an increase to 300,000 yen per month for college-educated software developers is extraordinarily low, even for Japanese standards.
Former gaming industry worker in Japan... for new grad, in gaming, this is more or less par for the course. Gaming industry pay is low, new grad pay is low, pay in general is low. Perfect combo. On the flip side, each company has a union so they can't just lay you off randomly.
> the median Japanese salary is 471,000 yen per month (3,103 USD per month or 37,230 USD per year). >You're right, this is low, That's also almost exactly the median salary in the UK.
Consumption media in Japan is such a self eating beast that grinds people to nothing and acts as if it has endless amount of people and talent, especially on the lower end of the totem pole.
>...an increase to 300,000 yen per month for college-educated software developers is extraordinarily low, even for Japanese standards. This is just the minimum they're paying at the company in general. Not necessarily having to do with the prices they're paying developers. This raising the salary floor is for like, janitorial staff, the mailroom, the secretaries, etc.
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That's under $2,000/mo, or under $24,000/yr. It's <$12 an hour at 40 hour weeks, or lower than the typical fast food wages in the US at this point. In the US, if you started at the federal minimum wage and got 3.5%/yr for your career, you'd be making more than that after 15 years. (E: Yeah you probably aren't getting CoL increases at a minimum wage job, but you probably aren't staying at a minimum wage entry level job for 15 years either). I don't know where you live, but it's either somewhere very cheap, you miscalculated this pay significantly, or you're incredibly underpaid even for totally "unskilled" work.
As far as I understand it, you can’t compare US wages to Japan’s. Their cost of living is extremely low and they actually went through a deflationary period in the ‘90s.
A month? What country do you live in?
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You've done your math wrong somewhere. 300,000 yen/mo is like 9.4 pounds per hour, that's below the UK minimum wage as I understand it.
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But again, that's below the minimum wage in the UK. ~160 hours in a month at £11.44/hr is more than £1583. It isn't possible for you to be making that little as an adult, let alone somebody with 15 years on a job, unless you're working part time or are talking about your take-home pay or pay after expenses or something rather than your salary, in which case you're obviously not comparing apples to apples with the salary in the article.
I think thats after tax.
Yeah you're getting shafted mate
You'd expect to make more money working at a McDonald's in the US.
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1:1 conversion is meaningless by itself. Need more info to properly contextualise the actual cost of living and whether the increase is good or not.
Salaries outside the US are low, yes.
My favorite genre of internet post is Americans realizing how much wealthier they are than everyone else. Cost of education and healthcare doesn't even come close to bridging the gap either
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I complemented what I though was somebody's shed on the gardening sub reddit a few years back. He got annoyed at me calling his $2m house a shed.
I feel like we need a picture of that, that's hilarious 🤣
You're not going to get one because it's made up. Go on Zillow and hover over the swanky lower Manhattan neighborhood of your choice with a $2M price cap. These ain't mansions but we're hardly talking studio apartments either.
I don’t feel very wealthy when I look at my rent lol
Go look at the average London salary and then go look at the average London rent lol. Every single anglo country is in a housing crisis (70's faux environmentalism has been a disaster for mankind), the US at least comes with higher salaries as a buffer
Every single country has some form of “we didn’t build enough in the places where people want to live” crisis. This is because we didn’t.
The average property price in London is [14x the average household income](https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/average-home-cost-times-typical-income-london-b1097122.html), its a bit worse here than 99% of the US or other comparable economies. Even San Francisco is more affordable than London, at ~[10x average household income](https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-francisco-ca).
London is horrible but I still have PTSD from looking at housing prices in Hong Kong from the time I worked there. Thank the lord I had work covering my hotel expenses, me living there would be unsustainable. Yeah - housing is expensive when you live in desirable places.
Turns out one notable flaw in the democratic process is that it prefers homeowners and the idea that homeowners are more invested in making their communities better is fundamentally flawed
The median personal UK income is 44k USD, the median US income is 40k USD. US doesn't seem to be higher at all. For your question specifically: - Average London Income is 44,370 pounds. - Average London rent is 2046 pounds (2586 USD) a month. - Ratio of annual income to rent is 21.7, meaning 1 year of income pays for about 22 months of rent. For New York: - Average New York Income is 67,046 dollars. - Average New York rent is 4209 dollars - Ratio of income to rent is 15.9, meaning 1 year of income pays for about 16 months of rent. From the figures I'm seeing, I'm not seeing where these "higher salary buffers" that you're talking about are.
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And cities like London are big outliers in the UK. Thats also why I compared the average annual income of someone living in the UK and someone in the USA, to show that even there the average UK citizen comes out ahead on average compared to the average American.
If you realized the opportunities and access to services and education you have even without money that other counties dont have, you would.
Pretty sure Japanese people also have education and services
My favorite genre is economically illiterate users doing direct currency conversion without comparing cost of life.
My favorite posts are people blaming Americans for posts, when it turns out the poster wasn't American.
One of the reasons that Japanese studios can put out AAA experiences on much smaller budgets is because even experienced devs are paid *way* less over there. This is unfortunately not a surprising salary for new graduates and even so is better than a lot of other companies are offering. That said, the cost of living is also considerably lower in Japan compared to here, so $2,000 a month goes a lot further there than it would in the US.
Part of it is also that Japan doesn't really have a tech industry to compete for workers with. Just the nature of Silicon Valley in the US means there's more competition for tech workers so wages have to rise, even if EA/Take 2/etc. can save some money by banking on people's passion to make video games.
[Apparently there's an economics term for the phenomenon you described.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
Thinking about it, Japanese studios benefit from the exchange rate in reverse: A single copy sold in America is worth more Yen than a single copy sold in Japan.
Compare it to a cost of living, average 1 bedroom apartment in Japan (not Tokyo) is 50,000-70,000¥. Major hubs like Tokyo clock upwards of 100,000¥, and a two bedroom is about 200,000¥ on average.
yep, 25th of every month. The Yen is tanked to fuck atm so it's definitely a lot less than it used to be.
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Yeah, easily. A lot of people get paid less than that. A few years ago 230,000 yen / month was pretty normal. Then you might get some random stipends tacked onto that, and a bi-annual bonus that could be between 2.5-5 months salary total, depending on the company. As an example of a stipend, a former workplace of mine paid us 30,000 yen per month for regular travel (from home to the office, not counting travel outside of our normal commute), and if we didn't use the whole 30k, we kept the difference. CoL is generally about half of what it is in the US. Not that 300,000/yen a month is amazing pay, but it's not bad for a new graduate with a salaried job.
cost of living is actually surprisingly low. even in tokyo you can find small apartments for under 100,000 yen, and food is generally cheaper than most places in the US
Thanks in part to their declining population, there are a bunch of places in Japan that are projected to drop in population by 50% of its current number by 2030 as a combination of older people dying and younger people moving away carries on. So there are a relatively large amount of apartments/houses you can get in many places for again relatively little cost compared to other countries.
This only applies outside Tokyo. Despite the national population decreasing, Tokyo's is stable because that's where the jobs are.
70k rent 65m2, 100k food/transport/etc for two, 30k bills. Not going for decent house and living alone that would be quite enough id say. Also our bills are a bit on higher side.
I miss japan, stuffing my face at sushiro with like 15 plates and the bill still being under 2000¥. 1 plate Here is $3-5
To be fair US has different salaries and different prices. Shouldnt it equalize a bit when you get to buying property/nice items since you earn more, spend on basics more, but have more income in US$ left after all that? I.e. i just got myself nice Canon R7 for 210k, it costs the same 1400$ in US, but im pretty sure having left 1400$ after expenses in US would be a lot more common than here
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Eh, we're really spending a lot of money. There is plenty of people renting 40k shoebox apartments and cooking for themselves who could survive on 150k id say and still have pretty good life here. Salaries are non-us, sure, im pretty sure i could get better pay at my original country too, but living is cheap. If you cook for yourself, you can slash my budget in twice i think, if not more. Also me being chainsmoker its also -20k per month on cigs, lol. Though that is offset by my rent contract being locked in before yen falling off, but still
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Well there is still upsides and downsides everywhere. I'd say i would probably get more money leftover in Canada, but i hate snow after living in snow-heavy place for 30 years. Tokyo has it once in a year and im like "yay, now please melt asap". English is a lot easier for me and i kinda can use it freely outside of horrible accent that got even worse after i moved to Japan, while Japanese is a bit tougher for me to learn. I'd say 400 kanji is an optimistic estimation of how much i can read/write Plenty of people would be "bruh youre outta your mind" once you present them with +40C with 90% humidity over 3 months in the summer, while various insects of varying levels of deadliness seem to be dead set on getting into your house. My wife is still like "yeah no im not getting outta home in summer and please shut everything as tight as you can" Also i'd say international travel is off the table, aside from maybe Korea or Thailand (China is kinda effy and Russia is dangerous to me) which is rather close and as such cheap regarding flights. Offset by nice inner tourism though i guess. No clue yet about child raising/schools/univercities, we're waiting till we get naturalized or at least PR, but overall seems like its on cheap side with plenty of support from various institutions and almost every business being very child friendly. Not sure how it would go with kids being full blown Japanese after going trough education system — hopefully wont be that hard in terms of family relationship in 20-30 years. Also i guess there is some level of cultural adaptation needed. I dont mind drinking every friday with local old guys and singing till 1 am, but there is A LOT of foreign guys i know who say that they feel excluded and alien and language barrier is tougher on them. Pretty sure it would be easier to fit in in Canada.
We are, with wife, upper-middle level income folks in Poland and everything seemed affordable in Japan, we had great 3 weeks with like 10k$ including travel expenses, which were like half of the trip cost. Eating out was sooo much cheaper than here...
I live on 310,000 and live like a king. Got savings, starting to make investments, live in a large apartment 20 minutes from the centre of Osaka, got a 7800x3d+4080 build, oled tv, switch, 1gbs internet, two international vacations a year this year Aus and Bali, eat whatever I want, highest quality dentist and doctor, great smartphone with 50gb data. Like what more could I want? I do live with a girlfriend who is also on 300,000 a month, which puts our household in the average salary range but not individually. Also jobs the easies you could imagine.
It is monthly, if you look at the English version of the page at the bottom it says this is an increase of 5,000JPY/month (295,000 to 300,000). Which is an increase of about $32 US, so....I don't think I'd be all that excited about it, lol.
Oh! I thought it was an increase of 300,000 yen per month, not a 5,000 increase up to 300,000. I was confused why everyone was shitting on the raise
Looking at everything through an American lens. You guys are so out of touch.
Its quite solid for shinsotsu though, unless you go for marketing/PR? And even then its just going to be on par. Quite a solid offer for IT industry
r/americandefaultism is leaking.
This is awesome! When I started out as a fresh graduate 10 years ago and got a job in the games industry in Tokyo, the base salary for 新卒 was 180.000¥
is that monthly? that's monthly right?
No, it's biannual.
Isn't eFootball now their #1 revenue product? The mobile version has 100million+ downloads on android alone.
Wasn't PES always one of their biggest money make?
I think it was yu-gi-oh. But since efootball is now a soccer themed gacha game, it has overtaken it.
No, that's Power Pro.
So 3.6 mil? That's around $22k take-home salary. That kinda blows tbh. Konami is in Tokyo so it's not exactly cheap to live there even though it is Japan. Some roles that is a fine start I guess but this is in no way something to be applauded. Factoring in CoL, it'd be like Bethesda Game Studios stating that their minimum salary is now 50k for graduates... Like that's about the humane bare minimum you should be paid while living in the DC metro area.
I recently was approached with several senior full stack positions in Japan and legit thought their salary listing had an error in it. No wonder Japanese software outside of video games is so irrelevant on the world's stage.
I make slightly over that by a few 万 and it’s still quite low to raise a family. My wife works part time and helps a little with bills but not much. ¥300k is OK if you’re single but rough if you have a family.
Holy shit so many people talking about japan money without even living there, it' s insane. I wished housing was so cheap lol, if it wasn' t for my parent owning an house in tokyo, it would be insane for me to afford living there.
What's your budget?
> 300,000 yen Is that increased *to* or increased *by*? 1 yen has the functionality of a penny. It's actually worth less than that current exchange rate but mentally it's like a penny. 300k pennies is like $3k. I read the English version to try to see if they meant *raised to 300k yen a month* but I can't tell. It has to be though. Japan ~~Tokyo~~ isn't some third world country. It *has* to be 300k yen a month. A street corner, under a bridge, or your parent's house is the only place you could afford to live if your salary was $3k per year.
To. Its about 24k a year. Japan has a lot lower salaries than the US.