how do i survive as a gaijin?!
 

any other english speakers living in japan have any tips on where to get foreign stuff on the cheap, or how to generally not go insane living in such a different place?

... or especially anything to reduce the cost of living.

Make stuff yourself and not rely on imported things?

If you want to reduce the cost of living, live like a normal person does. Your cost of living is going to be high as long as you need foreign stuff to live.

What is it that you feel you need to buy from overseas?

Japan is not the place to go to get foreign goods (I assume from English speaking countries) on the cheap.

But you need to give a bit more information for anyone to be any help to you. Where do you live? What, in detail, are you finding that is driving you insane?

Basically any 'foreign stuff' you actually NEED while living in Japan (and this will vary on your person but for me generally involved toiletries and proper black tea) you have effectively struck out already as it either won't be available in japan at all, or if it is, won't be cheapy cheap.

Everything else can be forgotten about.

how about clothing? dont know if you are tall but lets say if i were to go, how likely is that they will have something for a 6.3?

Depends if you're a guy or a girl. Guys can sometimes get away with it as there ARE tall Japanese guys in Japan and they have to shop somewhere. There were plenty of tall guys living at the Japanese Uni I went to, most of them went shopping at some point. Uniqlo, I think, is pretty good for catering to the Long and Tall. Obviously the less tailored the item, the more likely you are to find something that fits off-the-peg. Big feet is usually more of a problem. As a girl, provided you are not absolutely Pamela on the top, you can normally find tops even if you are tall, but jeans/trousers might be harder to find for the leg length. Again Uniqlo is pretty good, or vary your style of trouser/ switch to skirts. There was one exceptionally tall girl I knew who simply 'saved' all her trousers for when it was cold and wore skirts all summer. Depends on if that would bother you or not!

If you do need especially larger sizes, then you again will probably have difficulty so best to stock up from home.

If you are a girl, definitely bring your own bras if you are a D or more. You can by larger size bras in Japan, but it may take you a while to find ones that suit you, depending on where you are.

im a guy :cool:
so basiclly bring your own stuff :)

Only really jeans/shoes-wise. You can get pretty much everything else; it's not like Japan's suffering a clothing shortage.

Or... Make a trip to a big department center, pretty much all of which have "Big and Tall" areas - or at the least plus size departments with a tailoring service. Or order from somewhere online. Now it is not nearly as hard to find specialty sizes as it was in the past.

There are very tall people in Japan too. They`re not extremely common, but they`re also not extremely rare. They buy and wear clothes too, and shops realized they could make money by catering to them.

I`m quite short, but have very large feet for a woman in Japan. These days it`s not even that hard to find cheap shoes that fit. My husband - 100% Japanese - has huge feet, and although it`s a pain to find shoes in the style he wants... finding shoes is not an issue.

Or you could just bring your own stuff along.

Let me just ask - are you already IN Japan, or just thinking it is going to be incredibly hard to live there before going?

It really does depend on where you live I guess. Up here in a small country town in Hokkaido I find the cost of living to be very cheap. Much cheaper than living back in Australia. Partly because there's hardly anything to spend lots of money on here.
My wife and I use the internet to buy english books and DVD's and about once a month we head into Costco in Sapporo and buy up a whole lot of western foods we enjoy (like decent sized beef steaks!). We bought a dedicated freezer to store up the stuff we buy.
Clothing wise, well I hardly ever buy clothes. Maybe once a year I'll head into one of the big outlet malls in Sapporo or Chitose and buy a few things to last me out another year and I'm a big guy but can generally find a few things in my size.
We are lucky in that having two incomes makes a big difference and we fully own our home so no paying rent each month. Still I don't find the cost of living in Japan as a foreigner to be all that expensive at all. Thankfully I don't live in a megatropolis like Tokyo or Osaka! I'm sure that would cost me a hell of a lot more...

yeah... i'm most definitely already here.
wow... some of you are quite defensive, aren't you? i'm asking how to get along here, inside advice. i was trying not to get too specific because i didn't want to exclude any advice anyone might have.

fortunately enough i'm only 5'8", so i don't think finding clothes will be that much of an issue. i've been to uniqlo. that place is pretty cool and reasonably priced from what i saw. more advice on cool clothing stores would be nice, i need to buy shirts.

hopefully i brought a enough deodorant with me from overseas (i'm attached to old spice red zone soft solid) to get me through the time i'm staying here. i don't THINK i'll need any other toiletries from home, but i'm not sure. again, this is a place where someone living here would have more advice.

the costco advice was good. that's probably going to be the biggest thing for me, trying to adjust my diet and survive without western foods. also there's only so much ramen, rice, or pasta with fake red sauce i can eat before i start to lose my mind.

Defensive? I would watch my words if you really want help.

Really, be specific, or you are going to get advice like "do your best!", "make new friends!", "don't be afraid!".

Besides deodorant, I would also make sure you have enough toothpaste w/ fluoride from your home.

I am not sure where you live, but even McDonald's seems to be just about everywhere. I am not saying you need to go every day, but sometimes a cheeseburger and fries is what I need to get me through a rough patch.

I wasn`t meaning to be defensive... You just simply can`t imagine the number of extremely detailed questions that are asked by people who have never been to Japan. A lot of people assume things are very different from reality. and some people will debate about issues they have only heard about somewhere online.

When it comes to food - make your own. Seriously. Learn to cook the dishes you enjoy and break any prepackaged/processed food habits you have. I don`t mean that to sound harsh - it`s something you should try to do wherever you are. Processed food isn`t good for you, regardless of whether you like it or not.

I am usually really stumped when people say they cannot adjust to the Japanese diet because all the ingredients are available to make whatever it is you like to eat, or at the very least something passably similar. I honestly cannot think of any western dish that I could not make if I felt the desire, and all with ingredients from the local grocery stores. Vegetables are vegetables. Meat is meat.

Japan isn`t really a frozen/prepackaged meal country anyway - even the combini stuff is fresh and most of it isn`t "processed". I think that even a regular Japanese person would go crazy trying to survive on that type of stuff.

For clothes - you`re 5'8". I don`t think you`ll have problems finding clothes in any shop that will fit you height wise. Unless you are very large (either overweight or extremely muscular) you are not a specialty size at all and should be able to pretty much shop anywhere. Go to a mall, walk around and see what shops have the type of clothes you want, and buy.

Anyway - more detailed info about where you are will certainly help get better answers. If you are anywhere someone is familiar with, you may even be able to get more "insider" advice. Japan is a big country.

i personally live west of sendai in miyagi. i'm 10-15 minutes from sendai station by train.

yeah, thankfully i brought a ton of toothpaste too. at least i got that right. i was thinking of stopping in at mcDonalds or KFC soon. i also saw a burger place in sendai station... great burger or something? i think i remember reading it was a japanese chain.

as far as restaurants, i'm trying not to eat out much, but i'm going to need to find a pizza place that makes actual pizza. there are a couple of local chains i've seen, but they tend to be super expensive and make nonpizza.

yea... i didn't come here expecting much. and most of what i've found is that things i've read tend to be either blown out of proportion, or largely ignored. for example how expensive it is supposed to be. granted, i don't live in tokyo, but i've found some things are more expensive, and some things are cheaper. or the assumption that electronics are so much cheaper here when in fact they tend to be much more expensive. not too bothered by most of that though.

well, i'm not attached to processed foods. an example is that pancake mix isn't too hard to find or that expensive... syrup, on the other hand, comes in small bottles and it's INSANELY expensive. so unless i can find some cheap syrup or non-"pure maple" type syrup, pancakes are out of the question.

my diet right now consists of chicken (or beef if it's on sale), pasta/rice/ramen noodles, bananas, eggs for breakfast, and the occasional sandwich. that's fine for right now, but if i don't add some sort of variance, it will eventually slowly drive me nuts.

i've tried the native curry and it's not exactly up my alley, but i don't know how to find english curry. even if i were to make the curry paste from scratch, some of the ingredients aren't something i've been able to find. i was also thinking of trying to track down some mexican ingredients, but i can't find tortillas (thankfully i brought a boatload of cumin with me from the states).

i also located a couple of vendors who sell the cheese powder you'd find in a box of mac and cheese. as i haven't been able to find boxes of that anywhere, i was thinking maybe getting a bunch of that shipped would be an easy cheapish way to do mac and cheese (just buy pasta from the store).

A note, more to MMM than you - in the past year or two, I have seen more and more toothpastes adding fluoride. Now it`s harder to find one without than with - so fluoride toothpaste is no longer one of the "virtually impossible" items it used to be. Even the weird salt and herb stuff grandmother-in-law uses now has fluoride.

If you avoid Aoki`s and Pizza-La, you can usually find fairly decent pizza. Really good pizza takes some more looking around. I have never had Dominos in Japan but hear they are pretty close to the same as the US if you order one with the toppings you want. Pizza Hut in Japan is also pretty close to what it is in the US. It just depends on the toppings. I am almost tempted to say that if you ordered an Aoki or Pizza-la pizza with normal toppings (no mayonnaise, no corn, etc) that you could probably get something tolerable, but I kind of doubt that.

I find it`s a lot easier to get Italian style pizza in Japan than US style. Tons of restaurants have stone ovens and will make a fairly good Italian pizza - but not many delivery places. The refrigerated pizzas sold are also quite good if you add a little extra cheese and bake them.

Pancake mix is a processed food. It`s a prepackaged mix. As is the cheese powder for mac and cheese. A lot of things you don`t really think of as processed, in fact are.

This is actually a lot easier than you would think. The ingredients are easily available, as are ready to go spice mixes. One of my favorite spice mixes is sold at Muji, which is pretty much everywhere.

Mexican food isn`t big in Japan, so tortillas are pretty much limited to specialty shops. I would check out Kaldi`s - they tend to stock that sort of thing and have shops over most of the country. Looks like they have a couple near you. (Which reminds me, I need to head there in the next couple days. The local one has some great Thai curry soup on sale for 88 yen a pack. Bought one just to try it and it was almost as good as made from scratch stuff.)

I would say that to add variety to your meals, you should really just learn to cook some different things. Spices are really not hard to come by in Japan, nor are raw ingredients. It`s just knowing how to put them together to make something different.

I do know this is true, but after coming home after a year (in the mid-90s) with over a dozen cavities, I have a slight reflexive reaction. The fact there is still toothpaste without fluoride makes me want to play it better safe then sorry...but point well taken, and I am glad to see the progress in that direction.

Trust me - I know far too well and used to warn people about this myself. Tap water in Japan is not fluoridated, so cavities pop up like CRAZY if you don`t use fluoride toothpaste.

This is actually something that kind of put me off the fluoridation of water in general as it seems your teeth sort of lose the ability to preserve themselves after a while and develop a dependence upon fluoride. (Kind of like how using lip gloss all the time reduces your lips ability to keep themselves from chapping.)

Of course, if you`ve had fluoride in all your water from childhood - there isn`t much you can do other than just make sure you keep getting that fluoride.

i'd personally prefer to not have it in my tap water. having it in mouthwash and toothpaste is enough.

Where I live now in the US is one of the few places in our area (if not the only place) where the water is not fluoridated. It means we are careful about toothpaste and mouthwash and our local dentist recommends kids up to 12 take fluoride pills.

Not sure what you mean by 'english curry', but curry is dead easy to make in Japan with a little investment in some spices.

Your average curry-from-scratch is simply

meat,
onion (diced)
chili (chopped)
garlic (crushed)
other veg (diced)
tomato paste

and maybe lentils or something for bulk.

if you take yourself off to the su-pa and hunt around you can usually get enough to make up a garam masala; cumin, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamon, black pepper, cloves, coriander seed and bay leaves. if powdered, mix up each time you make a curry, if whole-spices you can measure out the proportions and shove it in a jar. Or make up your own dry mix by adding and taking what you like and don't like. You can also make wet spice pastes with the onion etc already incorporated and freeze them in portions.

But seriously, Japan is much better situated for getting hold of fresh spices than the UK is. I have never seen fresh galangal in a british supermarket (that wasn't a specialist). It was frequently on sale in both Sanko and Topworld in Osaka.

i am also partial to wishbone. good for pretty much anything. i've even used it on a sandwich


awesome! thanks for the advice!

No problem, let me know if you want actual quantities/proportions.

that would be awesome! busy for a couple days... but i'll probably bother you for them in a lil bit!

As Japan is a western nation by any definition but it's location, I don't find it all that different from America or Europe. The people look different, and they speak a different language, but Japan shares a great many things with the rest of western society.

I actually have no problem keeping my sanity here, provided I keep myself busy and live an active life.

As for the cost of living, there are two ways to deal with it; either spend less money, or try to earn more of it. After limited success with the former, I chose the latter, it's better to prosper than to merely survive.

Being a foreigner is difficult as it's pretty much impossible to fit in with the normal routine of things in Japanese life. The salaryman's life is all but an impossibility, but that's not a bad thing, who wants to be one of those "soshoku" wimps anyway? Being a foreigner, you live outside the box, and you can see things in ways that most Japanese cannot. There are opportunities available to foreigners that are not available (or simply aren't visible) to many Japanese. Find a niche and work in it.

I started a small export business a few months ago, and it has added a lot to my income. It started as a hobby, and has grown to the point that it has make me less dependent on my teaching job (which I still like). I hope to go into business for myself full-time after another year or two.

If I need American goods, I can get them online at the Foreign Buyers Club, or I can simply go to Costco. Costco is the only place in Japan which has decent pizza, it's twice as big as the pizzas you get from Japanese "pizza" restaurants, and costs half as much. The annual Costco membership is 4000 yen, but you'll save that much money if you buy 3 pizzas in a year instead of buying them from Pizza-la. Costco also sells quite a few foreign food products, such as beef, pork, and chicken from America, and the other goods usually cost 40% less than what Japanese stores charge for the same items.

You don`t have to have a membership to shop at Costco. You can buy gift certificates and use them for one day entry - saving you the yearly membership costs... Which are really high if you only go a few times a year (ie. You don`t live anywhere near one)

Someone take the movie Dr Strangelove too seriously there ?

:D

Just a quick tip on tortillas, Kobe Busan has a 12 pack for 198 yen. In Kaldi they are 498.
Also Kobe Busan does pizza bases 7 pack for 198.

One of the best things I found out just recently is that the markets around where I live have usually 20-50% off on their bentos when it's time for them to close. So instead of buying a lunch the next day for 500 yen, I just buy a 250 yen bento the night before. Of course, I am not too sure if all markets have this deal, but if you can find one, it'll help save a lot of money.