Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah salaries are pretty low in Tokyo for a lot of jobs, if you're on the lower end of the skill hierarchy you're going to be in pain.

But ... it's not like low-skilled workers in SF are getting paid much either.

The average HN reader might be in a better negotiating position w.r.t. salaries in Tokyo

Some things to consider about Tokyo:

- No need for a car, insurance that comes with

- Your company will (in almost all cases) be paying for your daily transportation by car

- If you're willing to suffer in the morning with travel/take a bus to the train station, you have a range of prices for renting

- There are a lot of people living on low salaries, so there are a lot of services on the low end. 100 yen shops with high quality stuff, all things considered.

For 60,000 yen/month you can get 20m2 studio appartments (25-year-old buildings) within 15 minutes of stations like Nippori or Otsuka. If you follow the "1/3rd of salary" rule, it's reasonable if you're making a bit over minimum wage (not sure what the going rate for English teachers are)

that contrasts with the reality that the average commute time in tokyo is 66 minutes (2011). I suspect the median is probably longer then that.

SF is cherry picked, the most expensive place in the US. I live in Philadelphia and the commute time and cost is substantially lower. NYC would be the most appropriate comparison, and they get to work with nearly 20 minutes less commute.

I bring up commute because many people have long commutes because they simply cant afford to live closer.

Ah no worries. Give SF 30 years of declining revenue for all it's industries (like Japan), with several financial disasters during that time, and SF will not be expensive anymore either. Living within 66 minutes commute to SF will be positively easy.

Great! I can't wait for SF to become cheap enough so I can move there.

...

When it gets cheap enough, you won't want to move there. That's why it'll be cheap.

Good weather, nice charm, isn't that why everyone wants to live there anyways? It's like how California is just is crowded so no one goes there anymore.

This is why I'm not buying a house in the Bay Area. I look at these properties on the market for $1.5m for a run-down house in the bad part of town just because it's "only" 15 miles from SF and I think that there's no way this is going up in value forever.

> I suspect the median is probably longer then that.

Generally when the median is greater than the mean, it's because there's a long tail to the left dragging the mean down. I expect that the opposite is true: there is a long tail to the right, with a small number of people who have exceptionally long commutes.

So I'd expect the median to be lower, like it is for salaries.

yeah i bet you are right. Its probably bunched up to the left with a long right tail

Tinto is also the most expensive place in Japan. It's quite expe dive compared to Osaka, the second biggest city.

Tokyo's rent is comparable to Dallas or Madison, WI (give or take some square footage because American housing is less efficient in space usage). Way cheaper than NYC for sure.

There are a lot of people who do 90 minute+ commutes for sure. Even for relatively small commutes you end up with a fixed cost of about 20 minutes for just going to the station from your home or leaving to go to the office, so 30 minutes is good.

It's possible to live close to your office if you're willing to live far from trains a lot of the time though. Living 20 minutes from any station instead of 5 easily cuts 30% off the rent

How accepting are the authorities and people of electric bikes/scooters?

People ride scooters all over the place in Japanese cities. They're pretty commonly used for delivery services as well. Biking culture is actually more aggressive than in many places in the US. For example, it's for some reason acceptable to ride your bike on crowded sidewalks, belying everything I understand about notions of Japanese civility.

One reason this works is that folks use their bells and people yield. Even in more unexpected areas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7oGk-ozhKI

Not really my experience. I've seen people trying to ride bikes in areas where people could barely walk. And I've been on many sidewalks where not watching your six when moving right or left was an invitation to get run over on a sidewalk.

Electric bikes are making headway but many employers have rules specifically forbidding employees from riding them (or any other form of personal transportation) to work. There is a major national insurance company with which employers have a contract and that company won't pay out for accidents that happen on the way to or from work while the employee is on a bicycle or in their own car, so employers ban commuting by bicycle or car.

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