The Visa problem:

If you’re Visa ends at about the same time your contract does, you might be tempted to think it’s all over. Faced with the same proposition, I considered getting a tourist visa, but I was dissuaded by everyone I spoke too. Most people advised me to get a McJob with some crappy eikaiwa company or other – just to get the working visa so I could continue to search for a better job. Don’t. You’ll inevitably have to change your Visa to another type anyway and you’ll just be tired and saddened from such a lame job.

A lot of recruitment companies will tell you that they cannot even consider you on a tourist visa and that they cannot possibly “sponsor” you to get a working visa – stay away from these companies as they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. “Sponsorship” of a visa means you have a contract, a university degree, and a short form to be filled in. It takes 2-3 weeks until you can officially work, but in the meantime most places I’ve dealt with will have you start on an “unpaid” training basis. If a company requires from the start that you have a working visa, they aren’t worth working for.

I was also told by one major recruitment firm (Robert Walters – who I’ve heard nothing but complaints about from other friends by the way) that I would even have to leave the country to get or change from a tourist Visa – which was true until about 5 years ago when the law changed. That a top recruitment firm executive dealing exclusively with foreigners does not know about Visa law is quite shocking. Let me repeat:

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LEAVE JAPAN TO OBTAIN / CHANGE TO / CHANGE FROM A TOURIST VISA.Companies that tell you they cannot sponsor a visa, or executives that tell you a tourist visa is troublesome ARE NOT WORTH WORKING FOR.

You could also get married, which is what I will be doing at the end of this month; but since my fiance is Chinese it doesn’t especially improve my Visa situation.

The money problem:

You can survive quite easily on around 150,000 yen a month, possibly less if you’re apartment is super cheap. But since you have no income at all now you’re screwed right? Wrong; as long as you’ve been working for a year or more and paying into the official state pension – something which every employer is legally required to do – you are entitled to receive unemployment benefits should you lose your job because of situations out of your control. Having your contract not renewed is one example of beyond your control. If you quit yourself, you’re going to be in a more complicated situation and it could take up to 3 months to get any unemployment benefits, but this shouldn’t be an issue for most of you. You can read about my experiences on applying for unemployment benefit here.

If you have been employed in Japan, you are entitled to claim unemployment benefits should you lose your job, regardless of your Visa status

You can also try plying your trade and skills if you have any. For example, I can fix computers. Since I lost my job and put the word out that I was now repairing computers, suddenly a lot of work just came in – and of course, it paid. In a month, I made around 80,000 on little side jobs just fixing computers. A lot of these little jobs were from friends and acquaintances – so if you’re unhappy about receiving money from friends for services and time that you give them, you should probably re-evaluate how you value yourself. Your service is worth something, whether it’s a friend or not.

Get yourself out there:

I hate networking. Damn, do I hate networking. I’m quite a socially inept failure actually. But the truth is, almost all jobs are awarded to people who were introduced to the job by a mutual friend or acquaintance. In fact, all the jobs I’ve ever had in Japan (apart from JET) have been through mutual friends etc. Clicking on the [Apply] button on GaijinPot may make you feel like you’re doing something, but there’s a 1% chance that you will even get an interview and that’s along with 50 other applicants. Even if you don’t have that many friends, just let people know that you’re unemployed and looking for work and I guarantee something will come your way. For the past month I was incredibly lucky to be introduced to the owner of a tea-house in Gion, and I’ve since started working there part-time teaching them how to use Apple Macs and even teaching English to the Maiko-san! Can you imagine that kind of job being advertised? No, because most jobs aren’t! I’m also going to start work full-time from next week as a research assistant at Kyoto University, thanks to an introduction by my previous head of department! And I’ve been working part-time for the last few months in a datacentre, due to the fact that I emailed Terrie Lloyd (a highly successful entrepreneur and IT journalist) asking for advice – and he then immediately put me in touch with HR department of the IT outsourcing that he happens to be the CEO of.

Most jobs are not advertised. Let people know that you’re out of work; and ask for advice from people in your field – you never know what like will bring you!

Clear out the house, and live on cheap beer:

Now that you have all this free time on your hands, why not use the time to clear out your house and give away / sell stuff you don’t need. I’ve been selling random bits on bobs on Yahoo Auctions and made a few thousands yen out of it. You’d be surprised what sells actually – old consoles, broken even, ancient ipods. There’s always someone who wants your crap. I’d suggest my own site, gaijinstuff.com too!

And finally, if you insist on drinking beer then lower you standards and start drinking the sub-100yen cans of fake beer like the ones featured in this post – 88 and 97 yen respectively from all good Gyomu Supa’s!

Got some job searching stories or advice to share? Please let us know about it in the comments! PS: Be a darling and click on the JapanSoc button if you found this article interesting / useful / laughable – thanks!

(*approximation. Actual numbers may vary.)

Shane Sakata at the Nihon Sun fills our bellies up for under $10 including a cup of Sake with her guide on cheap eats. Nice one Shane!

Et-chan at TokyoFoodCast is even cheaper than Shane, and shows us what to eat in Tokyo for less than 400 yen! Blimey, who said living in Japan is expensive?!

Wrightak from The Deep Japan Report has written a thoroughly comprehensive guide on the different point and loyalty card schemes in Japan. A Frugalista Seal of Approval for you sir!

Will at Heading for Japan introduces us to more frugal culinary joy in the form of 100 yen sushi on a conveyor belt. If only I ate sea-food…

Tony McAlpine from The Soul of Japan believes not quite so much in the idea of living frugally, but in earning a shed-load of money by fully utilizing his talents and earning a double income with his partner. Sound advice indeed.

Sleeptako, while not enjoying onsens, encourages us to check out the frugal clothing store Shimamura – good quality, cheap clothes that even gaijin fit into. Thanks sleepytako!

Michael from OneYearTrip, who forgot to include references to the matsuri and disabled comments (but we’ll forgive him this time), has written about 10 offbeat and frugal experiences to have while in Tokyo – your trip needn’t focus solely on geisha and temples, you know. Check out the real Tokyo! Thanks Michael!

Leon from China Dropshippers introduces us to a good idea for making a little extra yens while in Japan by frugally starting an online store. Which is exactly what I’ll be doing in a few weeks so stay tuned!

We also had a last minute entry from Cab over at MadSilence, a collection of useful money saving tips from their own experience in Japan. Thanks!

Finally, I thought I’d submit one of my own posts from another site for you iPhone owners in Japan. Frustrated by the small screen on your iPhone and wish you could just use it’s internet connection on your laptop instead? You can, it’s called tethering, and you DON’T have to jailbreak your iPhone! Read the full tutorial on how to enable tethering on Softbank’s iPhone on my new site TokyoBIT.com~

I hope this months matsuri has been useful for you all in some way, either inspiring you to earn more or live on less! Next months matsuri is set to be held by Andrew at ALT Directory, which I’ve guest blogged on before regarding my monthly budget / expenditure living as a ALT English Teacher. You can find out more about the Japan Blog Matsuri on the FAQ page here, and submit entries using the Blog Carnival Widget thing here.

This month, I’d like us all to share our best frugal tips for living here in Japan. Those living here for the long term, please share a little of your insiders info and elite advice! If you’re not currently living in Japan and hence have no idea where the cheapest ramen place ever is located, please don’t feel left out though – you can still enter the matsuri with more general frugal tips that you think might also be applicable here in Japan.

So there it is. The only rule is try to stay away from writing about budgeting, as that was covered by a previous matsuri hosted by Tune In Tokyo, and as ever pictures are appreciated. You can enter through the blog carnival submission widget thing, by leaving a comment on this post, or by mailing me directly. Deadline is August 25th! Let’s doing happy useful blog carnival tip giving Japan!

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After lots of requests for information on investing while in Japan, I’ve decided to write a very basic introduction. This time I’ll be looking at managed funds, which is probably the easiest way to get a good return on your spare income with minimum of effort over a long term. Of course, there are other investment options – stocks, foreign exchange trading – but they require far too much effort and you’re just as likely to lose money unless you really know what you’re doing.

THE ABSOLUTE BASICS:

A managed fund means you pay money into your fund every month, usually a minimum of around 40,000 yen. When you start your investment, you must choose when your investment will mature – for instance, 5 years, 10, 25 years. You can however make regular withdrawals from the fund before the maturity date (but not recommended). You must make minimum payments every month for at least 18 months from the start – after which you can adjust the payment amount, or take a short break, or start to withdraw money. So if you know you’re going to be teaching English for at least 2 years, now would be a fantastic time to start. That’s the basics.

START NOW:

The most important thing is start investing early.

If your 20-25 years old, this may seem a little ridiculous to think about finances and totally something you can leave until later, but if you want to be financial secure later in life then start now – you too can be a millionaire if you just start investing that money now and get a head start on the rest of us. Have you thought about totally awesome it would be to be able to say you’re a millionaire by the time you’re 40 – well that’s really not such a crazy preposition once you look at the numbers.

For my age group, 26-30, you probably already feel some impending sense of doom that you’ve managed to save up very little money over the last 5 years of life, and even if you have saved something up then keeping it in the bank here is less than worthless (in fact, your money is just slowly losing value on a global perspective), so it’s about time you think damned seriously about some lifestyle changes and definately start investing now.

If your over 30 and still not investing, then you’ve missed out on a lot of compound interest that you could have made if you’d started earlier, but luckily you should be earning more than these young’uns so your best bet is to start investing now with a higher amount each month.

Either way you look at it, you need to start now.

“The most powerful force in the universe is Compound Interest” – Einstein

The key point about starting early is the concept of compound interest. If we assume we’ll be making a certain profit on the money we invest, then each year that our investment is sitting there it will be earning interest on the money we put in (the principal) plus the interest we earnt last year. So let’s say you put 10,000 into your investment fund right now, and just left it at a rate of return of 5%, for 50 years~ that 10,000 would have transformed into 115,000 yen when you took it out 50 years later! The power of compound interest!

Let’s look at a more concrete example, using 8% – a fairly standard rate of return for a managed fund investment.

I invest 50,000 yen per month from age 21 for a total of 10 years. After those ten years, I just let the investment sit there until I’m ready to retire at age 41 (!).

My hippy friend who frivolously spent his 20′s touring the world, playing in a band and drinking various beers decides that finally, at age 31, that he should probably start thinking about his fincancial future and invest. With a good job he can afford 100,000 yen per month and is also hoping to retire at 41.

As we both reach age 41, my investment is worth 20,300,000 yen. His however is only worth 18,700,000 yen. Even though he paid twice as much as me into his investment for the same amount of time, I’m 2 million yen better off. Read that again if you need to.

Of course, if this were a real world example I wouldn’t have stopped after 10 years. More likely I’d have kept investing 50,000 yen a month for another 10 years, or even more if I could afford it. In that case, when I hit my 41st birthday my investment would be worth a cool 30 million yen, even though I invested the same total amount as my friend.

The point is that aren’t many things in life that make you money just with the flow of time. An investment is one of them, and the most important thing is to start early!

WHAT ABOUT THE RISK?

There are so many risks involved with investing, that’s why you have to sign things that say your investment may decline in value as well as increase! It’s a fools game – you’re better off putting the money in a box under your bed!

Whatever. I’ll be totally honest here and tell you that right now, in this horrible economic climate – my investment is actually worth less than the amount I have paid in. But do I care, am I worried? No – not one bit, because in the long term all these minor economic “crisises” fizzle out. When the economy recovers again, my investment will recover with it. A lot of people will pull all their money out at this point – cover their losses and run – but that’s about the stupidest thing they could do. That’s why you invest over a long term. The cycles of economic ups and downs always correct themselves as history as shown time and time again.

Unfortunately – despite what critics think – the same is not true for the current environmental crisis. Global warming is happening and it is not simply a natural cycle – which is exactly why I choose to invest my money in clean energy developments!

THE POWER OF INVESTING IN A FOREIGN CURRENCY:

In fact, my investment is doing even worse now because of the fact that it’s in American dollars! “What a stupid decision that was!”, you might think – but not so. In fact, any clever frugalista will realise that right now the dollar is cheap, and my yen can purchase more dollars to put into that investment than it could last year – so if anything, now is the time to pay MORE into my investment account! Do you really think the dollar won’t recover in the next 20 years? At which point, I will have made even more profit by leveraging the power of investing in a foreign currency while it was cheap! On the other hand, if the yen ever devalued to something ridiculous, I could just reduce or even stop payments until it recovered again.

YOU MENTIONED CHOOSING FUNDS?

Yes – the type of investment I’m referring to here is called a managed fund. This is where you allocate your money to a particular fund. That fund, or pool of money, is managed by someone who chooses where to invest it – given the objectives of that fund, the level of accpetable risk and the likely return. Each fund will perform independently, so the more funds you distribute money to then the safer your investment will be. Each fund has a certain level of risk – high risk funds could make as much as 15-20%; medium risk around 10-15%; and low risk about 5%.

Personally, I want to make sure my money is invested morally – so the majority of my fund goes to high risk emerging energy technologies and biotech industries. Despite being high rish, I believe that it was a morally good choice to support renewable energy and I believe that in the coming years those industires will boom. Land or gold based funds or usually fairly safe though.

You don’t really have to do a lot of research when you start investing – just check the current list of funds on the website and pick out some that sound appealing to you for whatever reasons you have. You can redistribute your funds at any point at no extra charge if you change your mind.

Oh, and one more thing. If you make your investment payments through your credit card, you’ll be getting an additional 0.5-1% back in cash or points! For me, this works out to about 10,000 yen free every year, which I can then re-invest!

And that’s pretty much it. Bear in mind, I’m no financial manager. But, I do know that getting your finances in order and beginning your investment right now are the keys to being financial secure later in life. I would like to recommend my personal investment manager Matthew Murray, who writes the financial column for the Hiragana Times, so if you’d like to get in touch with him directly please drop me an email or use the form below and I will forward your details onto him. If you have any questions you think would benefit everyone, please write in the comments section too! Thanks~

Yes, the truth is out – the frugalista does not budget, because the frugalista does not need to. Being frugal is state of mind, man~ Being frugal is not about budgeting, being cheap with your money, or holding back on the things you enjoy. It’s not about cutting up your credit cards either – I have 2 Japanese Visa cards and some from my account in the UK too. No – it’s about setting up your finances so that everything is automatic and all that’s left is for you to enjoy life and make the most of your time here in Japan.

A few days after payday, my rent is automatically transferred. My credit card balances are automatically paid in full every month. My investment is automatically deducted and placed in my offshore fund. Another deduction is automatically placed into my savings account. Anything left is for me to spend that month, guilt free on whatever the hell I want. And I can check my balance online, anytime I want, with an itemized bill at the end of each month for what I spent on my credit card.

There are a couple of key ingredients that you need in order for this to work though.

1. You need a bank in Japan with online banking. I’ve recently joined Shinsei bank, and with it’s online ENGLISH banking it’s by far the best in Japan, especially compared to the likes of Kyoto bank which is possibly the most backward Japanese banking institution I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with. They give you a free transfer each month in the basic account and free withdrawals from 7-11 ATMs – what a unique concept, eh? Free withdrawals at ATMs, crazy I tell you! If you come here on the JET program as I did, do not allow yourself to be goaded into the nearest Japanese bank for the sake of convenience for the Japanese guy who got the lame job of guiding the new gaijin around town. As soon as you can, get a decent bank account set up and start automating your life.

2. You need a credit card – a Japanese credit card. I wrote about this before, and I still think it’s hard for foreigners to be approved for a credit card when they first come to Japan, but some readers were adamant that it was easy. Ask your bank after you’ve had a few months with them, and always apply for the lowest amount of credit with the “don’t need cashing” option. Never, ever, use your credit card to get cash out at an ATM – you will start paying interest on that money immediately and it will harm your credit score.

3. Start investing and do it automatically, every month that you are here. If you’ve come to Japan right after college then chances are you really aren’t thinking about mutual funds and investment portfolios and such, but the truth is that the next 3 years of your life you’re likely to have a cushy, well paid stable job and you may as well take advantage of it to start investing. Most new millionaires are not rich by starting their own business or winning the lottery, but simply by starting their long-term investment when they were young and keeping it automatic. Here’s some figures taken from the most wonderful book I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which I highly recommend:

Smart Sally invests $100 a month, starting at age 25, for just 10 years. With an 8% rate of return, by age 65, her investment is worth a whopping $350,000. Dumb Dan invests the same amount ($100 a month), but starts when he is 35 – and he continues to pay that much every month for 30 years! At the same rate of return, at age 65, his investment is worth just $270,000. Even though he invested for 20 more years than Smart Sally, he’s still $80,000 behind!

If you take nothing else out of the matsuri this month, which would be frankly impossible, please at least start investing. I have a wonderful investment manager who answers all my questions, and if you’d like me to put you in touch with him personally please just drop me an email and I will forward your details on. He would be more than willing to chat to your on the phone or answer your questions via email about investing – and I know you’ll thank me when you retire early and can enjoy yourself without financial worries later in life. Getting rich is not a quick thing – it takes real planning and the most important thing is to start investing today!

4. You need to be aware of your fixed expenses each month. Fortunately as long as you don’t go crazy with the aircon on all-night or talk incessantly on your keitai, your utilities are going to be fairly similar every month. Work out roughly how much of your fixed income will be deducted each month and then you’ll be able to work out how much you should be automatically investing, saving – and what’s left after all of that. Here’s a general plan of conscious spending, and how much that breaks down as for the typical post-tax ALT income of ¥250,000 a month:

50-60% Fixed expenses – this includes rent, student loan payments, utilities etc. (¥125,000-¥150,000).

10-20% Saving – for big events, vacations, emergency fund, moving house fees. (¥25,000-¥50,000)

10% Investment (¥25,000)

30% Guilt-free spending and charitable donations (¥75,000)

If you can’t survive on only ¥75,000 spending money each month, you really ought to readjust your lifestyle and reevaluate what you consider to be worthwhile of your time and money.

5. Never spend more than you can afford. You don’t have to track your expenditure daily or limit yourself to 500 yen for lunch, you just have to keep a track of the major things you spend and bear in mind all the little things are going to add “a bit more” on at the end. The fact that you’re going to use your credit card to do this, and that you’re regularly saving some money, means that if you get the bill and you’re going to be short this month then no worries because you’ll still have time to shift money from your savings to your normal account, all of which can be done easily online!

[poll id="3"]

Japanese internet is the best in the world, hands-down. But if you’re moving house or if you’ve had your internet contract for over 2 years, I strongly suggest you head to your nearest electronics store and change your internet provider. Having recently moved, we went into town to get signed up for some high speed internets. Since this is something we were going to be getting no matter what, I was eager to take advantage of any offer or campaign we could. We ended up getting 20,000 yen worth of BicCamera vouchers for signing up in-store for NTT hikari-fibre 100mb connection (the price is the same by the way, whether you sign up in store or phone them directly). The only catch was that we had to sign up for cable television for at least 3 months too, the first two months of which was free and of which the 3rd month cost us 6,000 yen; and the fact that we are locked into a two-year contract. Still, with the extortionate key-money and deposit we payed on this place you can be damn sure we’re not moving for at least two years. So after canceling the worthless cable TV today, we still ended up 14,000 yen in the positive – which we promptly used to buy a second-hand Nintendo Wii! We later found out that BicCamera was also running a similar campaign where you could just get a Wii instead of the vouchers, so I guess you might want to look into the deals a little bit more than we did.

Who is your current provider, and how good is it? Any plans to change? In my own experience, NTT hikari lines are by far the fastest – I had a Yahoo BB ADSL connection when I first came here, but the speed was pathetic and often it would just disconnect – I’ve only ever heard complaints from friends with regard to their BB connection too. I guess it’s pretty obvious when you consider that NTT brings a dedicated fiber-optic cable into your house while Yahoo/Softbank BB is essentially running through a standard telephone line. BB do seem to advertise better though – reminds me of the old days where any magazine you bought would have an AOL cd attached – carpet bomb marketing I guess you could call it.

If you live in Japan, you may have noticed that most beer cans have a little sticker on them that you can collect, stick on a special flyer along with your address and a 50 yen stamp, and be entered into a draw or just get something for free. It’s not just beer either, a lot of the products here run special point promotions that involve cutting out the labels or barcodes to get free stuff, you just need to look at the packaging a bit. If you tend to buy a certain product then check the manufacturers website for current campaigns / promotions, you’ll be surprised how many they usually run. Before I start, let’s do a quick poll on how many of you have actually bothered collecting these things before.

[poll id="2"]

What can you get for free or win?

Varies. In the past, we’ve got a cool little shopping bag from Pasco bread stickers that we use everyday now; some small bowls from another random bread company I don’t remember; I’ve had a couple of crates of beer turning up on my doorstep; 1000 yen prepaid gas cards from Gillette… But the real horde is yet to come – since my girlfriend started working in a bar last month, she’s been bringing home beer can stickers every night and we’re sending out a couple a week! I’ll guess we’ll know if was all worth it in the coming months. I’ll be sure to post here with updates.

Filling in the form:

Here’s a breakdown of the form you’ll need to fill out for those of you lacking in . Writing in romaji is fine. I’ve noticed that not all supermarkets tend to stock these special campaign flyers, so you may need to shop around a little. For beer stickers, most liquor stores will stock every kind of flyer.

Don’t forget to stick a 50 yen stamp (be careful not to waste an 80 yen one like I have before) and post it off.

You may also need to fill in how many entries you want. The key kanji you’re looking for here is “mai” 枚 and “kuchi” 口. MAI is the number of stickers you need per KUCHI, or entry. So, choice A may be 「２４枚１口」(24 sticker for one entry) and choice B might be「６枚１口」(6 stickers per entry). You need to do your own math and write down the number of entries on the postcard if you are able to enter more than once on one flyer.

This Asahi summer campaign has four different choices of competitions to enter. Each one has a different number of stickers for one entry. If you really really want one of the products, you can also pay an extortionate amount of real money AS WELL AS collect half the usual stamps and they’ll just assume you won, but that’s a little ridiculous – the point is to get free stuff here.

This is for Pasco bread products, it’s actually an old photo and as I mentioned earlier, we got a good quality sturdy “eco-bag” from this campaign that we use everyday now. We didn’t even have to send this one off – just take it to a participating supermarket.

Final word:

If you’re a fickle shopper like me who doesn’t mind changing brands of coffee or bread everytime there’s a new promotion, you can get some really cool stuff for free. The stickers on the beer cans are always worth collecting even if you don’t drink alot – the actual stickers don’t have an experiration date, but the flyer does, so keep them stuck on your fridge if you don’t think you will collect enough in time. It’s also quite inexpensive but effective anti-retail therapy for those of you who like to shop to relax!

Please let me know in the comments if you’ve ever won anything off of these kinds of promotions, I’ll be very disappointed if you none of you have even bothered. Free stuff people, come on!

Also, if you’d like to enter one of the promotions but you don’t understand part of the flyer, feel free to ask away in the comments or mail me a picture of it to [help] AT [gaijinstuff.com] and I’ll see if I can clear something up for you.

1. You downloaded from an evil peer: Torrents are a peer-to-peer network – that means that rather than downloading from a central server, your file is coming from 1 or more other people on the internet (usually quite a few). Believe it or not, there are evil companies out there that are paid by the RIAA and movie corporations to infiltrate the peer-to-peer torrent network and pretend to have the movie you’re looking for. They advertise themselves on the torrent network, and then you when you connect to them and attempt to download the movie from their computer, they record your IP address. Then it’s just a simple case of sending a letter to your ISP saying “IP address x.x.x.x attempted to download movie X, here is the proof”, and your ISP takes it from there. This is the single biggest reason you will get caught. What can you do? Don’t worry. There are kind people on the internet (hackers) who make lists of these evil companies and all their evil computers, and it’s pretty simple to use these lists to make sure you don’t ever go near one of those evil computers. Essentially, we can set your computer up to automatically get a blacklist of evil peers every day, and that’ll make you 99% safer instantly.

2. Your ISP is spying on you: You have a constant stream of data coming in and out on your internet connection. Your ISP can of course look at this stream of data, and can tell pretty much what you’re doing. If you’re downloading a movie via torrents, they can tell – they might not be able to tell what movie it is, but they can tell that your downloading it via torrents. This isn’t usually a reason to worry, as most ISPs don’t go around spying on their customers for fun – but if you’re constantly streaming an above normal amount of data, then they’re going to want to know why. If they flag you and find out you’re downloading movies, or even hosting your own high traffic web-server, you’re likely to get a threatening letter.

3. Bandwidth limits: You may have a 100mbit connection, but that doesn’t mean you can use all of it all the time constantly. If everyone did that, your ISP would go broke in a second. That’s why many ISPs in Japan and America are implementing certain limits that when you go over them will either automatically cut off your connection or set off a red flag for further investigation somewhere. In America these limits are ridiculous – something like 20gb a month in some cases. Luckily, this is Japan and the limits are actually quite reasonable, but you should be aware of them. My own ISP for instance – “OCN” – has an upload limit of 20gb per day, which isn’t really a limit at all. However, they did send me a warning saying that if I went over that limit, they would be consequences.

Even if the worst happens, and you get a warning letter, you still have 2 chances left (in most cases), so don’t panic quite yet.

How To Protect Yourself: Mac OsX

I recommend and will be teaching you how to do these steps with a native OsX torrent client called Transmission. It’s the fastest and easiest to use in my opinion, and it has all the functionality we need to make you 99% secure in your torrent downloads.

Once you’re installed and set up your download directory, go ahead and open up the apps preference panel. If you’d prefer a visual guide to this, there’s an HD video below of myself explaining the steps involved.

1. Click on bandwidth tab. You’ll notice you can turn on a limit for both upload and download if you need to, but you’ll have to find out your own ISP limits. If you’re living in Japan, chances are you don’t have a limit but I would still recommend setting one so you don’t set off any alarms. As my own upload limit is 20gb/day, I have my upload speed set at 200k/s, which is more than enough. If you are constantly downloading then I would really suggest you turn on both an upload and download limit, or you may find yourself racking up terabytes of bandwidth (at which point, it is pretty much non-profitable for your ISP to keep providing you with internet).

2. Click on peers tab. On the part that says “encryption”, check both boxes for “prefer encrypted peers” *and* “ignore un-encrypted peers”, all your torrent traffic will be unidentifiable by your ISP. Your outgoing traffic is automatically encrypted by Transmission, but by setting these you will ensure everything coming in is too.

3. On the bottom of the same tab it says “blocklist”. You’ll need to download a list of bad IPs before you can turn this on, so go ahead and click on “update” button. It may take a few minutes. Then enable the other two checkboxes for “block bad IPs” and “update weekly”.

Congratulations, you’re now safe! Happy torrenting, and good job on choosing OsX!

If you’re using windows and you’d like a video walkthrough too, let me know in the comments and I’ll put one together. The steps are basically the same, but Windows requires some extra software to do the bad-peer blocking so it gets a little more complicated.

Previous Phones:

I’ve been with Softbank since I first came to Japan 6 years ago – for the simple reason that their models have always had their interface available in English. This is of course a huge boon for anyone new in Japan who hasn’t yet got the language down (good luck if you’re in that situation by the way, it took me 2 years before I finally felt like I could actually communicate competently). I can’t remember the exact models, because they were fairly bog-standard keitai that make phone calls and that’s about it. I believe they had calendar functions too – but since they didn’t sync with any of my computers I really couldn’t see the point in maintaining two separate calendars. Wouldn’t be great if my keitai could use my iCal as it’s data source? My last keitai had a TV too – I think I tried it once or twice, but the reception was horrendous and who wants to watch daytime J-TV anyway?! In short, they made calls and sent text messages. I never sent Japanese text messages though as typing in Kana on those models would require learning an entirely new keyboard. No thank you.

What value does my iPhone give me?

Easy Kana entry, Romaji style:

Essential for any foreigners who can’t be bothered trying to get used to the dingy and awkward keitai keyboards, the iPhone has a full size Qwerty with kana entry in Romaji, just the way you would enter it on a computer. Add in predictive text and full sentence Kanji changing and suddenly you’ll quite capable of mobile communication in Japanese! Wonderful!

All the news I could ever need:

Only minutes after we had moved in a few weeks ago, a woman came to our door trying to sell us a subscription to Yomiuri. I told here I read all my news on the internet and my iPhone, and she said I would be the death of the newspaper industry. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how true that was – newspapers simply don’t have a future in the digital age. Even the New York Times has calculated it would be cheaper for them to go entirely digital and give all their subscribers an Amazon Kindle than it is to continue printing on paper.

Rather than being fed a selection of news articles that are of no interest to me, I get all my news delivered to my iPhone RSS Reader from my personal selection of major new sites and personal blogs. I get job listings, news from home, news from Japan, new blog comments, cute lolcat pictures, political satire and my favourite web comics – I get whatever I want. Easy, simple, free.

GPS:

Oh sure, your keitai has GPS too does it? Do you know how to use it? Have you even attempted too – or not because it’s all in Japanese, runs slowly in Java and requires about 5 clicks to open it through some ridiculous application menu structure? Thought so… In one click, I can find out exactly where I currently am in Japan with the interface of google maps that I’m used to using on the computer anyway. I can search for another location easily in both Japanese and English, and get perfect directions there for either walking, by car/bike, or by public transport. For most place, I can even get a street-view of the place so I know exactly what to look out for when I get there. I have to honestly say that living in Japan and having my iPhone has made getting around so incredibly easy, even if all the other value added features disappeared it would be worth it for this alone.

Aside, it occurred to me the other day to wonder why taxi don’t all carry iPhones. We tried to order a taxi to take our friend from our place to the station last week, and after explaining our full address and postal code they still didn’t have any idea and actually wanted directions to the house. Was the biggest taxi company in Kyoto actually using a paper based out-dated map? Do they even know of the existence of Google Maps, because if they had it could have given them an exact and correct position with the address we gave, in seconds no less. I was truly shocked. I really wanted to say, “get a damn iPhone, you’re a total failure as a taxi company if you don’t know where stuff is!”. We eventually had to go outside and find the nearest apartment block with a name that was actually on their map. Update: For the first time in my life, a Japanese deliver man got angry with me this week because he couldn’t find our house. How much simpler would his life be if he had an iPhone?

The Internet. The REAL Internet:

Whoever thought of having to make a special separate version of the internet just for mobile phones should be shot. My students claim to use the internet on their keitai all the time, but what they’re actually using a minuscule subset of the real internet that has been pre-programmed into their bookmarks, and it frustrates me no end to tell them to visit a site for homework only have to have them say they couldn’t view it. The iPhone on the other hand does not need to view mobile internet pages because it can view normal internet pages, and the touch interface is such that navigating a regular size internet page is really rather intuitive and natural. The power of just being able to look up anything at your fingertips is pretty much un-describable… wait, no, I can describe it – it’s pretty damn cool.

Skype:

Prearranged to talk to your folks back home but can’t get back to your computer? No worries, just fire up Fring, an iPhone application that lets you talk (no video chat mind you) on Skype and numerous other chat and IM services. Update: Skype also now has an official client for the iPhone, which you might prefer if you only use it and don’t need the additional IM services that Fring offers. Frugally speaking, this means you can now make international calls at local rates using your Skype credit

Of course, they’re a ton more features I have even begin to touch upon – the fact that it’s the best iPod yet, the app store, integration with iCal and address book, the ability to fetch emails from your yahoo/gmail/regular mail accounts… frankly I don’t see how you can afford to live without an iPhone.

The house may be a little older than a similar priced apartment, but a home is what you make of it. You may also find you have free parking with a house, so it’s definitely a cheaper option if you’re currently paying for a separate parking space like I have in the past. You’re unlikely to find a house in the central city area if that’s a big point for you; but you’ll also find life a few kilometres out of the centre is a lot more peaceful and relaxed.

Cost Comparison:

Here’s a breakdown of the situation for my current house and previous apartment to give you a ballpark idea.

Apartment:
Location - central Kyoto, 5 minutes from Hankyu Omiya station
Rent: ¥ 50,000 / month + ¥5,000 parking fee for motorbike
Deposit + key money: ¥ 150,000
Size: 8 mat main room, tiny kitchen/genkan area, low ceiling bed sized loft space for sleeping, small veranda.
Notes: annoying landlord lives next door; wall to next apartment very thin

My Current House:
Location – North Eastern Kyoto, 5 minutes from Demachiyanagi Keihan station. Next to Kamogawa river.
Rent: ¥ 65,000 / month
Deposit and key money: ¥ 200,000
Size: 10 mat bedroom, 8 mat bedroom, 10 mat living room, 8 mat kitchen, 8 mat low-ceiling loft for storage, separate bathroom and toilet, 3 verandas, parking space for one car (or many motorbikes!)

I’m currently living with my girlfriend who is still a university student, so the house is big enough for the both of us and I’m able to pay all the rent myself to save her some money towards tuition. We also currently have someone renting one room for a nominal amount of rent, and it doesn’t feel cramped at all. As for getting into the very centre of town, it only takes about 5 minutes longer than when I lived in the apartment due to Japan’s awesome public transport – and truth be told, there’s a lot more to do out of town than in!

Do you rent or own a house in Japan? Let me know in the comments about how much it cost you and much cooler it than the apartment you were crammed into when you first came to Japan! If your still living in an apartment, what’s holding you back? Is it big enough for you?