How much is the cheapest rent you can get in Japan?
 

I read about capsule hotel and sleeping in Internet cafe. What would be the cheapest option?

Also what is the feasibility of an American citizen going to Japan to get a job as a hotel housekeeper or clerk for konbini stores in this economy?

Sleeping in a capsule hotel or cafe is definitely NOT cheap in the long run. Think of it more as a "last resort" sort of thing and not a normal option.

The actual cheapest option in the long run would be to rent a cheap room somewhere that is not Tokyo. Rooms are quite expensive there - even the crappy ones from what I understand.

Around here you can find rooms in the 20,000~25,000yen/month range pretty easily. Definitely less expensive than the 4500~6000/night of a capsule or the 1000~1500/night for crappy sleep in a cafe chair.

The economy isn`t the issue - your visa is. If you have a visa already that allows you to be in Japan and can speak Japanese... You can get pretty much any type of minimum wage (or there about) job out there.
But none of those will get you a visa, and without a visa you cannot be hired.

love hotels and internet cafes for short term, gaijin shared houses for a few months
that's my experience..

How cheap a rent could you get in Nagasaki? Osaka? Okinawa?
How much could you expect to earn from Konbini job? What level of JPLT should you pass to get the Konbini job?

aspiring to work at a convenient store... you're a sad sad pathetic poor miserable unfortunate person....

and

you won't get any immigrations officer in all of Japan to allow a work visa for that job hahahaha...
"Yes sir, I am positive that I am providing a service that can not be provided by Japanese citizens"
more like you'd do it worse lol

Dude this is what I'm talking about when I use weeaboo. Someone is legit delusional enough to go as low as trying to get a conbini job in the hopes of somehow making it to Japan. These are really people's aspirations? My mind has melted.

Honestly if I gotta choose between that and the dumbasses from a certain part of europe using obscene sophism to try to instill panic in a nation of people that have already been shaken and devastated by a natural disaster all under the veil of humanitarianism ... I'll take the idiot that isn't smart enough to turn his idiocy against others.

Sleeping in the park inside a cardboard box is your cheapest option.

Keep in mind you cannot get a job without an address, and cannot get an address without a residence.

Why people aspire to live like homeless people in Japan is beyond my comprehension.

It's got to be an illness... I mean it's not right... something is broken somewhere!

It feels like these days it's either evacuate! leave! escape! run for your dear lives! or ... "if I can go so far as to lick the filth out of homeless Japanese people's toe nails, will they share their 3 year old underwear with me?"

What are the ways to get a visa?

What is the cheapest option in Tokyo and how much would it cost?
A Korean blogger who have worked in Combini wrote that a 朝鮮族 (Korean Chinese) worked a night shift in a Tokyo Combini earning 280,000 yen/mo. which comes out to be $3382. http://flypo.tistory.com/328

Would you save more working in Combini in Tokyo or smaller cities like Nagasaki when you subtract the cheapest lodging options, respectively?

He was probably born in Japan or some how managed to get a visa for other reasons... like maybe his parent's lived there when he was young. No one gets a visa for working at a convenient store...
And 280,000y a month is going to be a hell of a hectic schedule, like at least 70hrs a week, at least!

When it comes to getting a visa - you might want to check out this thread;

http://www.japanforum.com/forum/livi...ive-japan.html

The only way you can pull it off without a degree is by having some really special skill, and long term experience in that field... For example, I have heard of someone who had extensive (20+ years) experience as a mechanic on very specialized industrial machines getting a visa without a degree.

You don`t exactly need special skills to work in a combini.

You can make a lot and save a lot working anywhere, if you work enough. The combini night shift is on the higher end of the scale when it comes to hourly-wage type jobs... But it`s still only 1000 or so. So... To get that 280,000/month, you`d need to be working 280 hours a month. Working 8 hour shifts every day, with a double shift once a week might get you there.

Of course, that`s before taxes and health insurance. 280,000/month usually gets something like 80,000~100,000 taken out for that. (Differs depending on where you live.)

Why on earth would you want to slave away with no days off just to get by?

I am confused as to why he wanted to work at a Konbini store.. but maybe this is his job back home? Sigh. I was just thinking that maybe there are unhappy people who think that happiness is easier to find in Japan.. Dear OP, why not try to aim higher? Then if all else fails, you can settle for the Konbini store plan..:vsign:

Would you say teaching English in Japan is a pretty easy laid back job?

Also what is the cyber cafe costs in Hiroshima and Okinawa?

From what I've heard it depends on a variety of factors. It's a job that can potentially be easy and laid-back, but not if you're planning on doing a good job and giving your students their money's worth. Teaching requires lesson plans, marking work, hours of lectures . . . if you do a good job you'll be spending a lot of your free time working too, like if a student has a problem you'll need to arrange time to talk things through with the student. People assume teaching's easy, but having taught and done a teaching course it's acutally very hard!

Some schools may let you turn up, talk to the class for an hour at a time, and do little else, but even if they did it wouldn't make you a good teacher and your students would suffer for it. So yes, it can be an easy laid-back job, but it really shouldn't be.

Rofl.

douchebag comments of the day, made by
RealJames
WingsToDiscovery

So what if his goal is to work at a gas station.
Some people would be happy to have even less, douchecrackers X_x.
im sure he knows his goals and limitations. and it sounds like he will do what ever it takes.

you think half the foreign people in the USA show up in management ?
At least hes aiming for something that might work for the time being.
untill he can find better.

and I bet they are way cooler to hang out with, than snobby
"omg i dont want to be his friend, he works at a gas station"
honkers.

Maybe I read the post wrong. I read it real fast. Sorry IF I missread something.

but Rofl @ floppycawk trollage if not.
Surely I missed something X_x

You are missing the essential and primary issue. A gas station isn't going to give you a work visa. A convenience store isn't going to give you a work visa. McDonald's isn't going to give you a work visa.

It is easier to dream of being the president of a corporation in Japan than to dream of pumping gas.

thanks for calling me a douchebag lol

and even if someone somehow got a visa for stocking shelves, if they were going to be doing it so much to make 280,000y a month, they would have ZERO left over time to even notice what continent they are in haha

it's not like it's taking a blow or salary cut to live where you want to live
it's surviving in a place where all you can do is survive, if you try to do anything else, like, spend one day a month sightseeing, or going to 1 concert, you starve

I'd like to point out to readers that this isn't exaggeration, it's fact. The former is feasible, the former is Impossible, with a capital I, and this period following it -> .
Hell I'm a president now haha. It's not even such an unrealistic dream lol.

May I ask what kind of corporation you are president of? And how do you become that? just exploring possibilities here.

The fundamental thing that some of you seem to not quite get is that you just can't rock up in Japan and expect to work in any job (even cheap arse ones like in a convenience store). For one Japan doesn't have any structured immigration intake policy. Australia for instance has an annual intake of around 110,000 migrants in it's skilled migrant intake and are looking at increasing it further. There is no similar intake in Japan. You can't just apply to come and live in Japan. You need to get yourself a working visa. And the first thing that immigration will look at when reviewing a sponsored working visa application is can a Japanese person do the same job without any problems? If they can then they are very unlikely to issue a visa. This is why english teaching is one of the main ways to get a visa. You will need to have a bachelors degree as a minimum to get the visa for a teaching position. Once you have a sponsored working visa it becomes easier to change careers as getting the visa extended is a lot easier than getting it in the first place. I have managed to spend the vast bulk of my time in Japan without teaching english (for which I'm very grateful as I didn't really enjoy it).

I teach English, I own an English school.
I worked at a few, hated them all, they sucked or has fundamentally huge business flaws or customer satisfaction flaws. I saw an opportunity to introduce a much better service than the competition, and jumped on it.

Can teaching English in Korea be just as laid-back and easy as in Japan?
How much do you usually earn? How much hours would you be working if your did the bare minimum and if you did a good job?

If you don't mind,
How much did it cost to start the school? What were the flaws? How many staff did you hire? Do you require a 4 year Uni degree in order to work there? Is there a site for it that I might see?

I don't think you understood me, if you plan on doing a good job teaching then it won't be easy or laid-back. Teaching requires a lot of time and effort, and if you just take the "easy" approach you probably won't last longer than one year there.

Teaching in Korea, I'm not too sure how "easy" that is. To my knowledge it's just as demanding - if not more so - than Japan. When I looked into getting a visa there to work (and what the employers ask for) they ask for a lot more than Japan does in terms of paperwork, evidence, qualifications, experience . . . I would say it's not an easy option at all.

In Japan you earn around 250,000 yen a month, and this is around 3,000,000 yen a year. The wages are near enough the exact same wages a teacher would earn in the UK, around £21-24k a year. Most jobs expect you to teach aroun 20-24 contact hours, and I think there's usually around 20-24 office hours too. So let's say 40-45 hours of work a week.

What I meant to ask was how much hours do you need to work if you do the bare minimum and how much hours do you need to work if you do extra hard work in preparing for classes. Do people come in a lot for the office hours? About how much of the office hours becomes waiting time?

How hard is it to get a teaching job in Japan? Can you still get it even if you have bad GPA?

Also could I teach Korean on the side? What's the demand like for learning Korean language?

It's not entirely difficult to get a job in Japan, however it's a very competitive market at the moment, so the more you have to offer the easier it'll be. You need a four-year bachelor's degree (three years is acceptable if you're in the UK), and I think it's at least 12 years of schooling in an English speaking school, and to be a native English speaker. A TEFL qualification can help, as can previous teaching experience.

Your questions about office-time I can't answer, you'd need to ask more experienced members who've spent time in Japan. The bare mininum number of hours working for a full-time job will be forty hours (aprox.).

You'd do best to look at these threads:

http://www.japanforum.com/forum/livi...-jp-2-0-a.html

http://www.japanforum.com/forum/livi...ive-japan.html

RealJames, do you have japanese teachers too? is your school mainly for teaching english to japanese or do you also have japanese classes for foreigners?

What if I came to the US from Korea when I was in 3rd grade (8 yrs old)?

You are probably fine. And I am willing to bet from now for the next year or so getting an English teaching job in Japan will be easier than it has been in a long while, with all the "flyjin" who bought the media hype, and headed straight for the doors. Anyhow in order to get sponsered for a work visa (if you are American) you do need a four year degree as far as I know.

When I first came over living in teacher housing cost me 13,000 yen a month, the place was a dump, and really shabby even by Japanese standards. I got used to it though and lived there for quite a while, and really saved a lot of money by doing so. Now my rent is 58,000 yen a month the place is smaller but billion times nicer, and part of my contract gets me 30,000 yen a month of that rent paid for. So i basically pay 28,000 yen a month in rent plus anywhere from 8000-15,000 in water/gas and electric bills each month. Internet+cable costs another 8000 yen, regular phone line is 1680 yen, cellphone is like 4000 yen. Food/commodities bought at grocery stores has always been around 3000-4000 a week when it is just me.

In all my time here I have been able to save about 50-60% of all my paychecks. I do not own a car however, and live my life on a bicycle or by public transportation.

RickOShay, how do you find that cheap a rent? Are there such cheap rent in the US?

It is dirt cheap because it is teacher housing. I'm not exactly sure why, but my guess is since local city and prefecture governments own the buildings they offer cheaper rent than you could possibly find at regular commerical apartments.

And I did not "find" it. It just happened to be where I was placed.