[steven]

If you cook at home, you can average about 300円 for a meal if you're careful. If you eat out, you're gonna be spending about 700-1200円 for a pretty average meal (which will vary by how much you eat). If you do a bit of drinking at an izakaya, it will cost you about 3000-5000円. If you go to a bit of a higher class place, which I think would be hard to go to all by yourself, you'll spend about 5000-10,000円 on a course meal.

It's easy to get into `konbini` food... I don't recommend this. To get full, you'll probably spend about the same amount you'd spend to go out to an actual restaurant, but you're gonna most likely be eating empty calories.

Rice is fairly cheap and will fill you up. There are also a lot of different kinds of noodles-- I eat soba, udon, and somen all the time. You can get a package of those for under 100円 if you do your shopping right (it will cost more for better quality). Cooking stuff like curry (with packaged rue) is easy and will last you a few days. Hayashi rice is the same thing. Another thing that works (and is good for dieting) is getting some cabbage. It's very cheap... and you can cut some up and have it as a side dish to help fill you up. Goma dressing tastes good, but I recommend Sushi no su (寿司の酢)　as it has like no calories and tastes pretty good. I could go on and on about this kind of thing so I'll leave it at this for now.

On the other hand though, if you wanna eat `western` food all the time, it will cost you a pretty penny. Excessive (by Japanese standards) meat will cost you a lot of money. Beer and packaged foods are also more expensive. Unfortunately, fruit and stuff like that can also be extremely expensive, so it might help to learn how to buy stuff like that "in season" or at least when there are sales.

It's good to balance things, but if you wanna eat cheaply, you're gonna be intaking a lot of carbs, so you might want to consider some 運動 if you go the cheap route.