I came here through the JET Program. I highly recommend you consider them your first, best, and perhaps only choice for at least your first year. There are alternatives, but JET pays the best and has (overall) better working conditions than most of the eikaiwa schools like NOVA and GEOS. Competition has driven wages down to unlivable levels for some of the privates (around ¥220,000/mo in some cases, the most I’ve seen lately is ¥280,000; income taxes are your responsibility) and while JET hasn’t increased its compensation (¥3,600,000 annual income guaranteed, possibly more depending on your contracting organization; income taxes after your deferment period are paid by the contracting organization) since its inception about 18 years ago, it remains one of the best since the wages haven’t dropped either. Their contracts also offer slightly more protection than the privates typically do and they have a support organization set up that provides recourse if you have problems with your work site. That last is a very nice perq you will absolutely not find anywhere else.
The glory days of being able to save lots of money while working in Japan are long gone. Those stories you might have heard about coming back with $10,000 a year in savings date from the late 80s, before the bubble burst. The cost of living is roughly twice what it is in California and the exchange rate vs. the US dollar is averaging about ¥116-120 to $1. That makes a JET wage worth about $30,000 a year, gross. Not bad, but not great for a job that requires at least a BA.
Food is pretty expensive. Rice is 2 to 3 times more expensive than the US, meat prices vary wildly. Expect to spend about 50% to 100% more for food than you would at home, even more if you want to have a more typically Western diet that requires imported ingredients. It’ll still be a bit expensive even if you eat Japanese all the time. Fruit is expensive even in season, and is hard to impossible to get out of season. I was pretty poor my first year and gorged on the incredibly cheap fruit when I went back to the US for my first visit.
Taxes are higher overall than the US. Income taxes are lower, but you’re not just paying income tax, you’re paying lots of incidental taxes. Many of these will be your office’s responsibility if you’re on JET, but not if you’re private. Everything you buy, including food staples, has a 5% national sales tax applied to it.
There’s an annual tax levied on residents of your area. That’s about ¥35,000 or ¥40,000. You MUST pay into the retirement fund. You can’t get out of it, to my knowledge, and that takes a chunk out of your monthly income. (You can petition to get up to 3 years of it back, but you have to do it after you leave Japan.) You also must pay into the national insurance program. Those combined will take about ¥60,000 out of your paycheck every month.
Some of the private companies will do some creative accounting to “fulfill” their legal obligations and give you about the same net pay as JET, but you’ll be paying for it in other ways. In my buddy’s case, one catch was that compensation for the health fees came months later, and he had to have an account in Australia or New Zealand to receive the funds. Technically, he had health insurance, which Japan requires for every single person who stays longer than 90 days, but the hoop jumping was incredible and the coverage was anything but comprehensive.
If you have a car, there’s an annual car tax (varies depending on the size of the motor, about ¥35,000 and up) and a biennial inspection fee (about ¥100,000 and up, depending on the car) that includes mandatory insurance, inspection fees, taxes, and other crap. “Optional” insurance, which you really should have since the mandatory is not sufficient, is about ¥60,000 a year for a good driver over 26.
Highways are toll roads and will cost you about the same as taking the fast train over the same distance. It costs me about ¥5,000 one-way to drive the equivalent of the distance from Los Angeles to San Diego. It’s only worth it to drive if you can’t get there by train or if you go with another person, which is, I think, the point.
JET contracts are the standard you should compare everything to. Depending on where you work, you could get a lot more than the contract specifies, or almost exactly what the contract specifically mentions and nothing more. My first posting was the latter. It sucked seeing people who got more, but I later encountered people working as private ALTs who made me feel lucky. DO NOT come to Japan without reading and signing and receiving a copy of your contract, in both English and Japanese. If at all possible, verify that the Japanese copy says the same things as the English one. JET is the only organization I would even think of trusting in that regard. I have heard horror stories that you would not believe if you hadn’t been here for a while and seen what some of these places are capable of.
If you contract with a private company, I do suggest you not live in their housing. It’s cheap to start up, but they will be taking part of your wages to pay for the usual fees and you are at that point totally dependent upon them. While some places have decent living conditions, living conditions can be pretty bad in some of the gaijin flops they’ve set up. Since their name will be the one on the lease, you have no renter’s rights (not that you’d have many in any case). If you quit your job, you lose your place to live. Not a good situation to be in, especially if you quit because your job is screwing you over. A good friend recently found himself in that situation when he finished 3 years with JET and took something to tide him over until he could get on at a business-oriented company. He spent a year in what amounted to indentured servitude because the company paid for his moving-in costs (he didn’t collect a full paycheck for at least 6 months) and he would have lost his place to live if he’d quit.
You will need a big chunk of money saved before coming. Access to your US bank account is almost certainly not possible for weeks or even months after arriving, if ever, so bring cash. I would suggest having at least $3,000 with you when you come. Setting up a place to live will take most of that, if not all of it. Depending on the apartment, you will need first month’s and last month’s rent, a key/damage deposit, a fee to the real-estate agency, and miscellaneous other fees. In total, setup costs will run between 3 and 6 month’s rent, payable in full before you can move in. Rents vary widely depending on location. Anywhere close to a big city, especially Tokyo, will cost around ¥90,000 a month for a fairly small place. I live in a pretty rural area and my rent is ¥57,000. It cost me “only” ¥150,000 to move in.
You will need a guarantor to get a lease. (Even Japanese have to have one; it’s just the way it is here.) On JET, your supervisor or someone in your office will fulfill this role. If you don’t pay your rent, this person will be legally liable for your debt. With a private company, getting a guarantor will be difficult unless you live in their housing.
Apartments are unfurnished. When I say unfurnished, I mean there typically isn’t even a stove. That’s also standard for Japan. On JET, you will sometimes get the stuff left over from your predecessor, if you move into a place that the previous person was living in; private company housing is a total gamble. If you get your own place, you will have to buy everything. There will be no refrigerator, stove, heater, air conditioner, curtains, or in many cases light fixtures. You can forget about having nice Western-style furnishings like a big couch unless you’ve got a much bigger place than average and cash to burn.
You should not bring your pets. Like someone else mentioned, they sit in quarantine for 6 months (3 months on the US side when you return, I believe) and you’ll have to pay for their board. Finding places that would even consider letting you have a single pet would be difficult at best. I wouldn’t even give you odds on finding a place that would let you keep three or four.
It might sound like I’m trying to discourage you. I’m not. I think my experience here has been relatively positive. The fact of the matter is that relocating overseas is expensive, and Japan is one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in. You will have to make some sacrifices in your standard of living in order to have the experience. Figure on breaking even or slightly better after 2 years; one year will be a net loss, more than likely.
Oh, yeah, from your handle, I assume you’re a woman. You probably won’t be dating while you’re here. Japanese men are not real prizes in general (Japanese women sometimes start dating Western men just so they don’t get treated like crap by their boyfriends) and many of them are not interested in relationships with a foreigner. They tend to be more conservative than women, have less English ability, and don’t want to deal with the “pushy female” that is the common image of a Western woman. There are many fewer international relationships that are Japanese man/Western woman than Japanese woman/Western man. You probably won’t get any active discrimination, you’ll just be ignored. In some cases, they’ll paw you when drunk but will be hands-off at all other times. I haven’t met a single woman here who has NOT complained about not being able to meet anyone here. If you date, it’s probably going to be a fellow gaijin.
I strongly encourage you to go with JET if possible. I’ve been here for 6 years now, and I was lucky enough to get on with a local board of education after JET, getting slightly better than average wages and working conditions. I happened to be more qualified than most (I have an ESL teaching certification) and had some personal contacts with the people who were hiring. I could have found myself in the same circumstances as my friend, who now works for Sega, but had to go through a year of hell at a private company for shit wages. This is a guy who speaks good Japanese and who worked for 3 years as a CIR (Coordinator for International Relations) through JET, not as an English teacher, so you can imagine what the job market is like for people with minimal qualifications. The standard not-really-a-joke here is that NOVA, GEOS, and AEON (the big 3) recruit from overseas because no one who has lived in Japan for any length of time would be ignorant enough to consider working for them.
I’m definately going to go through with getting my Bachelor’s but I would really love to get more insight about actually moving out to Japan. Oh and I am planning a trip out there (first time!) next year, so I can have a better idea of what the country’s really like.