Quote:
Originally Posted by NTREEG
If it helps, I pay 80000 yen a month for rent and utilities, renting a room in a house with 2 other guys about 30 minutes from Iidabashi by train. I've never been a good cook, so I always eat out. It costs me around 60000 yen a month for food. You can lower that number if you take on a Japanese style diet and cook at home. My fiance was kind enough to add me to her phone plan so it doesn't cost me anything. But I think typically a cell phone would be about 5000 yen a month. I pay a little less than 10000 yen a month for a train pass from my house to my school. My tuition for language school is about 50000 yen a month. I go out very rarely, but when I do it costs maybe 5000 - 10000 yen a night (karaoke, izakaya, nightclub, etc).
So for me, 200000 yen a month is about right.
Also keep in mind, it will initially cost you a bit of money to get settled in Japan. When I first got here in January, I had no accommodations. I had to live in a hotel for the first 5 days (10000 yen a night) until I could find a room-share. I ended up buying a lot of necessities at the 100 yen shops: things like little plastic racks used to hang and dry your laundry; sheets, blankets and pillows for your bed / futon, etc. You'll need a few bucks for unexpected incidentals. Also, if you go the typical route for renting an apartment, you'll need to cough up 5 months rent for deposits and key-money. You could stay at a gaijin / guest-house and avoid such a large deposit but their monthly rents can be quite high for very little space. I was lucky enough to only have to pay 1 month's rent in deposit at my share-house. The difference being that my fiance arranged it in Japanese. I would have never found this place on my own.
As for a part-time job...well I'm working on that now. On a pre-college student visa, you initially aren't allowed to start working right away. I think immigration or your school makes you wait anywhere from 1 - 3 months before they'll grant you a work permit. I just got my work permit 2 days ago and I got my student visa the first week of July. They want to make sure your attendance record is good and that your grades are good enough to handle working and studying at the same time. By the way, I don't think that applies to Working Holiday Visa. Most of my classmates who've had their visas since January are working in restaurants. I don't know how much they earn. Most help wanted signs I see show a wage of about 800 - 1100 yen an hour. My classmates that are working are Korean and most work in Korean restaurants. Their Japanese is pretty good (much better than mine) and they can handle taking orders from and talking to customers in Japanese, including keigo after 7 months of study. I don't know if I could handle a job like that personally. I think my Japanese ability is far too low. I plan on contacting some recruiters soon and see if they have any part time work for programmers (I have 6 years experience as a software engineer back home). Hopefully the language requirements will be lower.
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I just wanted to point out that, as a student, you don't
need (some might want to) to pay 80k yen/month for rent&utilities. If you can live in a school dorm or a guesthouse the price range can be anything from 50k/month up to 80k/month and over. This depends on the location and quality of the house/room ofcourse.
For example I set my budget to max 70k/month (rent+utilites), and I've booked a room now in a guesthouse in Yoyogi (starting Sept). It's not super big, but around 10 sq. m. Toilets and showers are shared (as in most guesthouses). But hey, I mostly wanted a decent room and a nice location, so I'm happy about it. And well, if it would turn out to be a dump (don't think so though) there's only one month contract-time (or whatever you call it) so I could always move.
So I guess it depends on your demands & preferences.
Good and informative post anyhow NTREEG!