Fact: Singaporeans love Japan (apparently 6% of Singaporeans travelled to Japan in 2023. Conclusive statistics on outbound tourism seem really hard to come by, but i’m inclined to think that’s a lot). Anecdotally, it feels like maybe 3 out of 10 people i talk to in Singapore want to move to Japan. Death, taxes, and moving to Japan. An inevitability. The talking points are often the same - its safe, the food is good, cost of living is cheaper, people are nicer, and travelling around Japan every other weekend would be living the dream. And you know what? I agree. They’re all valid reasons for wanting to live in a place.

But also, here’s what i think - i think most of these people confuse the feeling of their senses tuning in to a novel experience with the concept of liveability. I think their experience of Japan sits at the high of the uncanny valley. The similarities are refreshingly fresh, making envisioning a life there an easy exercise, but push that a little further and the ways the experience might be uncomfortable start to surface.

That’s what this post is for - i want to talk about what made me uncomfortable (in case the heading wasn’t a major giveaway already, it’s money. Among other things) and ultimately what i think about being in Japan.

Here’s an arbitrary disclaimer:

• First, this is my experience, coming from my background, based on my worldview. Others might have had similar experiences and felt differently. Good for them.
• Second, this is in no way a criticism of Japan. Local habits and cultures are a fact of life, none are better than the other. It’s just a thing that is. This is about me reconciling my learned habits, customs and environment, with where i’ve moved to.

A preamble on my life in Singapore, without which this might make very little sense

Think about The Truman Show. In the film, Jim Carrey plays a man who lives an ordinary life without knowing he’s actually the star of a reality TV show. To him its life as usual, but everyone around him is an actor, and his whole life is a set, designed to restrict him to making certain choices. Over the course of the movie he develops a sense that something is wrong, and eventually orchestrates his escape, sailing to the edge of the set, finding the boundary, and leaving.

All this is to say that, everyone lives in some sort of an echo chamber. Some are self-imposed, but some are bigger than an individual - they dictate the actions the individual can think of, and outcomes they can arrive at.

Over the course of my life i’d very much followed the road of what i think is the upper middle class Singaporean way of life, and simply couldn’t comprehend choices outside of those expected for someone in my position. It never crossed my mind that i could try something, and not have it work out. That i might take a job i didn’t want to do. That i might have to make a choice between two contradictory choices and sacrifice getting one of them. I was blessed - the universe rearranged itself for me.

Or at least, that was what i thought. The actual fact was, the universe i lived in only ever presented a few paths to me. Pre-determined path, pre-determined outcome.

And a pre-determined environmental constant was that things were always framed in dollars and cents. Not that this is necessarily inherently bad, but i think it (inadvertently?) cultivated a binary mindset - things were either necessary, or a waste of money. I think of this tweet often, in a lot of aspects of my life, but with regards to my relationship with money in particular:

At the risk of making a sweeping statement that could get me cancelled (joke’s on you if you try though, nobody’s actually reading this), i think my relationship with money is representative of most Singaporeans’ relationships with money. We tensed ourselves into the higher ice cream probability shape, and the state obliged. Now we think we’ll get ice cream because we’ve tensed ourselves into the higher ice cream probability shape, and we tense more. “I earned it” and “i deserve it” become one and the same.

I’d tensed through my career to this phase of my life. I’d ridden the tension to financial security, and if i’d kept tensing for another 20 or 30 years, i’d live the Singaporean dream of buying a house, taking a few vacations yearly, and retiring (somewhat) comfortably.

I ultimately didn’t - unravelling tension is a key theme of my life, but that’s not important right now.

What’s important is, now that you know all this -

How much are you willing to give up to move to Japan?

If you’re like, a software engineer in FAANG, or an exec in an MNC, or a celebrity, feel free to stop reading right now. Common logic on financial decisions related to moving to Japan probably don’t apply to you.

If you’re none of the above, take this as a Singaporean data point.

Numbers

Lets say, for simple calculation’s sake, i make $100k/year (don’t read too much into this number - it’s just for easy math).

In Singapore, per year,

• i’d pay $5,650 in income tax (arbitrarily calculated here)
• i’d have to deposit $24,000 in CPF payments - our government-mandated savings scheme (this ceiling is increasing in future, but for argument’s sake let’s keep it here for now)
• My employer will deposit $12,240 into my CPF as part of their contribution in the scheme

As a Singaporean citizen, i can withdraw money from my CPF once i reach 65. Although deferred, this is still my money so i’ll treat it as such in this calculation. My gross income would be $112,240, and my take home would be $70,350.

Now, i want to move to Japan. My company adjusts for cost of labour in the market, and labour is determined to be 10% cheaper in Japan than in Singapore (this is a real data point, by the way).

Let’s say, for calculation’s sake, that SGD1:JPY100 (a highly conservative exchange rate, given the current climate). Using this exchange rate, the equivalent of $100k/year adjusted down 10% is JPY9M/year.

Using this calculator, per year,

• I’d pay JPY1,245,744 ($12k) in income tax and resident’s tax
• I’d pay JPY442,800 ($4.4k) for health insurance
• I’d deposit 713,700 ($7.1k) into my pension
• I’d pay JPY27,000 ($270) for unemployment insurance

As a non-citizen, i’m eligible to withdraw a portion of my pension when i leave the country, so i may get back anywhere between 60-100% of my pension contribution (I struggled so much trying to understand the calculation from Japan’s pension website, i eventually gave up and derived this eventual percentage from this article). My gross income would be JPY8.7M-9M ($87k-$90k), and my take home would be JPY6.2M-6.5M ($62k-$65k)

An additional factor into cost is that i lived in my family home in Singapore - not an uncommon scenario for many Singaporeans. I had the privilege of not paying rent. The cost of this in Japan is, let’s say, JPY2.2M-2.5M ($22k-$25k)

The final numbers on what i’d have to spend: $5,862 per month in Singapore, and JPY333k (or $3,330) per month in Japan. This is a 43% loss of disposable income.

All things equal - the same company, the same job, the same responsibilities - this is definitely not a financially sound decision.

Unravelling tension

The thing you have to know about someone with an unhealthy relationship with money is, it’s never enough. Objectively, i went from comfortable, to comfortable. I wasn’t skipping meals to make ends meet or anything like that. But my mental headspace spiralled from somewhat comfortable to oh-no-what-have-i-done. I was thinking about money all the time. I was worrying about saving for my future. I tensed hard, because that was the only thing i knew how to do, and felt betrayed when the ice cream didn’t come.

I had to learn a very basic lesson over time that your money is only as important as what you do with it. Kind of like learning how to breathe properly - first you notice your breaths are shallow, so you breathe deep. Then you notice your ribs are tight, so you expand them to open them up. Eventually your breath becomes automatic, you stop thinking about it, and you feel it in your bones. I had to exercise the muscle of spending when it brought joy, while simultaneously letting go of the loss of spending power. It’s still a work in progress. I still catch myself making financial comparisons sometimes.

But the question i need to ask myself is, if there’s no ice cream in the first place, why are you tensing?

The uncanny valley of process

The second point of discomfort was this vehement adherence to the process.

There’s this dogen skit i saw on Twitter a long time ago (for the life of me i can’t find it anymore) where he goes to the bank or something, and wants to do some sort of admin procedure. And to sign off on anything, he has to have an inkan, which is a stamp that acts as his signature. But as a foreigner, he doesn’t have one. And the punchline is that the staff rigidly adhere to their rules, and repeatedly tell him, 無理でね (that’s impossible), even when its clear he’s not Japanese and has no way to produce a stamp. (EDIT: i recalled this entirely wrongly. The punchline was that a robber tries to rob a bank - the teller asks, "well, do you have your inkan?" The robber says no, and the teller responds, "ah, well then. That's impossible.")

Anyway, this is what happens when you start descending the uncanny valley in Japan. Orderliness becomes the gospel of process. It feels extra frustrating because there’s no intent behind the person’s voice when they tell you it can’t be done. There’s no frustration, or malice, or emotion - it’s just a fact of life. Like they’re telling you it’ll be hot in summer and cold in winter. This is their pre-determined path and pre-determined outcome. Only… you’re witnessing it from the outside, having seen the possibility of other paths and other outcomes, in a world where process isn’t the be all and end all, and you just know that what you’re asking for can be done.

A case in point - we’d brought our international drivers license and residence card to rent a car, something we’d done a dozen times before. An employee told us it was impossible without our passport. We asked why, and she said she’d check with her manager. When she came back, she simply said, you can’t rent a car without a passport.

We asked why again.

She repeated the same answer.

We mentioned we’d brought our international drivers license and residence card to verify our identity multiple times before without any problems.

She repeated the same answer.

Any question we had short circuited her brain and sent her back to the last save point. There’s no reason why or why not - this was the process™ and it had to be followed (we later learnt from a different employee at a different outlet, who was much more experienced and understanding, that a passport is needed to verify our country of origin to validate our international license, but some places accept residence cards as a proxy. This made sense and made me wonder why the first employee couldn’t have mentioned this in the first place. Most likely, she didn’t know either.)

A second case in point - in Japan you have to apply for a my number card, which acts as your primary identity card alongside your residence card. You’ll then need to pick it up at your local ward office a few weeks later, when it’s ready. Well, you can’t pick it up without making an appointment. Not just any appointment, its a specific my-number-card-pickup appointment. If you walk in they’ll turn you away… even though your card is there in the box behind them. Why can’t i pick it up? “Well, you have to make an appointment.”

Is it worth it?

That depends - how important is money to you?

You don’t come here to earn money. Average wages rose into the 1990s, then stagnated for the next 30 years. The average monthly wage in Japan is JPY300k (or $3000). The average wage in Singapore in 2023 is twice that number.

If you’re Singaporean like i am, you can expect to lose >40% of your disposable income for an equivalent job.

So if retirement is the ultimate goal, then its unlikely to be worth it - this would feel more like a setback than a stepping stone.

In my opinion, a trade off (and for me, a particularly important one) is this - serendipity.

Last year for Christmas we went to a little “American Italian restaurant” (their branding, not mine). The restaurant, run by 2 guys, sits maybe 20 to 25 people. We ordered an appetiser plate, a pasta, a chicken main and tiramisu. None of these things tasted like anything i’d ever eaten in my life. The tiramisu was life changing. We ordered drinks from a curated menu of beer and wine - curated from a place of “we loved these and we want you to be able to try it too.” When they tell us, “this is delicious”, i trust them.

Everything about the experience fell into the right place, a jigsaw puzzle piece i didn’t know that was missing in my tableau of experiences.

I can’t buy these jigsaw pieces with my 40%+ extra disposable income in Singapore. I can’t buy the time we happened to drive through a mountain range when the light of the setting sun softly hit the edges of the horizon. I can’t buy the feeling of snow starting to fall while i sit in an outdoor hot spring. I have to chance upon them. And chancing upon them is impossible when you’re tensing about money.