> (It's another reason why, as a Westerner, you almost certainly do not want to try to live in Japan.) This is a really bad take, I've lived in Tokyo for 6 yea

> (It's another reason why, as a Westerner, you almost certainly do not want to try to live in Japan.) This is a really bad take, I've lived in Tokyo for 6 years. As a western developer (in IT as we say here in Japan), you will most certain improve your quality of life by moving to e.g. Tokyo vs most USA cities. While what you said it's true, there's also other truths: - As others comment, as a foreigner working in Tokyo with some experience, you can opt to much higher salaries than the local graduates (for so many reasons). It'd be easy to make 6-8M JPY in Japanese companies, and depending on other factors 8-10M JPY is not rare. Since we are in HN, I'm sure many here can even opt for 10M+ JPY. - If you can, just work remotely for US/EU while living here, or for a branch of a EU/US company, since salaries will be much higher. That is true. That way you can make 10-30M JPY easily, and with that you can live _very_ comfortable. Only issue you might have is how you manage to get a Visa. For reference, you can live well as a single guy in Tokyo with 4-5M JPY. Lifestyle is different though, so it depends on what you value, e.g. houses ARE smaller, but neighborhoods are walkable and beautiful (highly depends where you come from). If you do want to have your cake and eat to, meaning living in a "very big" house for Japanese standards while having everything else nice from Japan, yeah you'll need to be making 8M+ JPY for sure.