Quote:
Originally Posted by US27
Teaching English certainly is not the best way to go but it will work TEMPORARILY. BE WARNED: if you stay in Japan long enough and do not pay those taxes, the government WILL RAID YOUR BANK ACCOUNT AND TAKE EVERY LAST YEN YOU HAVE. I know people this has happened to. They live in poverty and can never save enough money to get out. My wife and I did the English thing for a while and we barely made it out alive. We got out several years before the NOVA Disaster. The OP is right. Teaching English will wear you out and you will end up hanging out at the gaijin pole drinking way too much chu-hi and bashing Japan. All your "buddies" will be other native English speaking malcontents. Give that about a year and you will age twenty.
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Never heard of this before. Your national income tax is deducted from your pay, and during your second year your local government will send you a bill for your residency tax, which you can pay monthly, or all at once. Most employers will pay the residency tax for you automatically if you ask them to.
Teaching English is not the most prestigious profession in Japan, but it pays the prevailing wage, and if you live outside the metro areas where the cost of living is lower, you can actually do quite well.
For those of us who quit teaching, and moved on to other things, we still have to pay taxes. And if we are lucky enough that our incomes are higher, so are the resulting taxes.
I have been here for 8 years or so now, and life is good. I have my own business, and now make more money than when I first arrived. Most of my friends are English speakers, which is natural enough, but I have no regrets about coming here.