Frugalista JapanMoney saving tips and ideas for foreigners in Japan!

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.

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For this months blog matsuri on living on a budget in Japan, I knew I had to write something. I mean, would the frugalista ever be forgiven if he didn’t write something about budgeting? I can make my excuses about a favourite places in Japan perhaps, having only made it as far as Tokyo last week despite having lived here for 6 years! Surely, Billy of Tune in Tokyo is expecting something of me this month. But dammit, I hate budgeting. Writing down everything I spend and totaling up everything each day? Thanks, but I have a life. Limiting myself to spending less each month on something I love? Err, screw you, hippy. Saving 5 yen by going to a different 100 yen store that absorbs the cost of consumption tax themselves? Whatever, if you really enjoy counting pennies then go ahead, I will not be wasting my time accompanying you on your epic adventure to the ancient realm of scroogedom. I do, however, spend consciously.

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I’ve just noticed the site subscription numbers are over 100! That means it’s time to make my next micro-loan of $50 (as I promised, one dollar per new subscriber after the first target of 50) to someone in need. Through Kiva.org, you can help to make a real difference by giving someone a chance to start or grow their business without them having to turn to local corrupt loan-sharks.

This time, I’ve chosen to make the micro-loan to a young woman called Mao Sophal in Cambodia, as I was recently reminded of the atrocious sex industry there. I hope if this young woman ever has child, she will be able to afford to educate the child without selling them into the sex trade, or indeed being forced into it herself out of poverty as so many are. I also joined the atheist kiva coalition to show how one can be altruistic without religious inclinations. You can check out my kiva profile here.

I guess my next target will be 200, at which point I’ll make another $50 micro-loan to another worthy cause. Why not go change the world yourself?

If you have relatives or friends coming to Japan and they plan to be the most of their time here city hopping around, it sounds like a Japan Rail Pass can be an incredible money-saver. Shiira at Gisuru.com has written THREE in-depth articles about the Japan Rail Pass, so you should go read through them carefully:

Introduction to the Japan Rail Pass

Deeper explanation of the Japan Rail Pass

and the step-by-step guide to purchasing the JRP

Basic points to bear in mind: you need to buy BEFORE you come to Japan and it’s only valid for temporary Visas; and it DOES cover Shinkansen “bullet trains” but not the super-super-super fast Nozomi; and it only covers JR trains and buses (not city subways or other companies). I’d say it’s more than worth it certainly if you plan to travel to more than a few cities here – the bullet train tickets alone cost a fortune. If you’re only planning to stay in one city though, especially Kyoto which doesn’t actually have any internal JR lines, you might want to really sit down and do the math.

Thanks again to Shiira for answering my questions about the Japan Rail Pass in such length!

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.

I guess this a little off-topic from the usual money-saving strategies, but lately I’ve been hearing from a lot of people who have received letters from their Japanese ISP with regards to having downloaded something illegal from the internet. I’m not going to get into the legalities of downloading movies and software here; let’s save that for another post. I would however like to show you exactly how you can protect yourself from ever getting a nasty letter threatening to cut off your internet if you don’t leave those torrents alone.

The Theory:
Firstly, let’s look at the reasons why you’re getting caught, and then I’ll show you exactly how to set up your torrent clients to make you safer:

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.

I am continually shocked at the amount of waste produced by institutions such as universities and schools, especially when one would expect the minds at the forefront of society to be the first to change the wasteful habits of humanity. Last week, our department held it’s annual freshman seminar, which basically means a bunch of speeches by students who studied abroad, a big buffet lunch, topped off by badly designed and very not fun “get to know your teachers” game. Not once was I consulted regarding the event, which is a shame since I ran a series of very popular childrens camp programs and have rather a lot of experience with event planning. It seems to me that so very little thought was put into the event, it’s such a shame when something wonderful could have been done.

The buffet lunch – the primary consumers of which I should say were 18 year old girls that tend to watch their weight very carefully – consisted of huge tables of random cold pizza, cold burgers and sandwiches and other finger foods. Very typical affair with sub-standard food, but the proportions were shocking. The portions were piled high and it was quite obvious from the start that no one would be eating that much. In fact, it seems it was planned on from the start – one teacher had even had the forethought to bring plastic trays for everyone to take home leftovers. Here’s what I brought home, sorry I didn’t take any pictures of the actual tables of food – but imagine about 5 times this amount PER PERSON being leftover and you’ll get the idea. That’s for 100 or so people, by the way.

Really, it made me sick to think that so much money and so much food could be wasted – I’m sure these girls aren’t paying extravagant tuition fees to have them frittered away on horrendously bad quality food and blank videotapes…

Not only was the food wasted, but the opportunity to make an enjoyable event that might be remembered by the freshmen for the rest of their university career was wasted by failing to consult the rest of us.

Submitted to Food Waste Friday @ FrugalGirl. Frugal Girl is one of my inspirations for starting this site, so do please go check her out.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the FrugalistaJapan twitter feed. I occasionally come across vouchers and random money-saving tips that don’t really warrant a full blog post, so I’ll be posting them to twitter feed instead.

Also, I recently entered some random Suntory competitions on the internets, and if I can get lots of clicks here and here, they will send me a case of beer! Yoroshiku tanomu! I think you can also enter the main competition if you do the quizzes they take you to, but they’re in Japanese. I’ll be sure to let you know if I get anything~

Coming soon: How to get free stuff in Japan by collecting random stickers. GETS!

For those of you who don’t know, whinge is a British word meaning to complain about something incessantly. I’ve been bookmarking and mulling over a lot of little things for the past week or so that I was planning to post lots of little whinges, but instead I thought I’d bundle them all into one and give you twelvty-times the value. Feel free to gloss over this if the inner ramblings of an angry frugal British guy don’t really interest you.

Happy Victims should be shot and their wardrobes sold:

An art-critic workmate of mine lent me a book today about fashion victims of Japan called “Happy Victims“. It was basically photos and interviews with a ton of Japanese people who are obsessed with a certain brand, going so far as to spend 90% of their wages each month on purchasing the latest seasons items. Some of them were rich housewives of designers, some regular office ladies working an 8am-11pm grueling hell hole of a job. I’m sure some of you are of the belief “each to his own”, and that as long as they aren’t hurting anyone we should just leave them to their clothing-fetish. Sorry, but I’m not like that. I believe passionately that humans have a moral responsibility to use their earnings responsibly, and sickens me to the heart to learn of these people wasting money on overpriced brand clothing, even if some of them are working hard for the priviledge of doing so. For the price they spend on one dress or outfit, a child could be clothed, fed and schooled until adulthood. There should be a 100% tax on brand name goods that goes straight to closing the poverty gap – that, or these people should be shot and their entire wardrobe sold, with the proceeds being used to raise some children with a hopefully higher moral imperative that collecting overpriced tat.

Pay for the priveledge of walking and running:

Last sunday my girlfriend convinced me to go to a free trial-session at a local sports club. I’m quite happy to go there for free, but I was pretty shocked at the membership prices – around 5,000 yen a month! The club had a pool, which I might have been more tempted to use if I didn’t have to wear a special cap for the purposes of hygiene. Hey, I understand cleanliness issues, but wearing a cap just sucks. It’s the reason I’ve only been swimming twice in Japan in 6 years – once is Lake Biwa in Shiga and once in a family pool that I had to travel an hour by train to get to and was packed with screaming children anyway. In England I swam every week and you don’t see me dying from some kind of hair infection. Whatever – the only real reason I would go to a sports club is for weight training anyway. But the machine room here was tiny. There was a row of walking and cycle machines, and about 2 proper weight training machines. They did a pretty bad job of convincing me to pay 5,000 yen a month for the privilege of being able to run and walk. If you really want to lose weight and get fit then start cycling to work and stop eating so damn much. Don’t waste a penny in ridiculously overpriced sports clubs. Do we really need to waste land with a building full of walking machines? Let’s destroy the sports clubs and build some green parks!

The Most Spoiled Dog in Japan:

Hey, I love dogs. And I totally respect this couples choice to raise a dog instead of adding another human virus onto the world, but this is just insane. (original via JapanProbe)

Merumo is apparently a top model in the world of doggy fashion magazines, the kind of thing that Japanese just spooge over.

• The apartment has a special security system that won’t allow visitors to take the elevator to that floor without an invitation.
• Merumo doesn’t like being hot, so her owner bought marble flooring for the living room. (estimated cost: 3,000,000 yen)
• She drinks out of a silver Gucci dog bowl.
• When leaving the house, she can ride in a Luis Vitton carry bag (236,250 yen).
• When going for a walk, she can wear one of several brand name dog collars and leashes: Hermès (65,000 yen + 85,000 yen) or Gucci (69,300).
• Merumo’s owner rents another room in the apartment building just to store all of Mermo’s special clothing. Merumo has a fancy kimono (80,000 yen), 10 fur coats (one costs 180,000 yen), and a whole bunch of other stuff. (Total cost: about 3,000,000 yen)

Sure, treat your pets the same as you would your own children is a pretty morally sound way to live I think, so let’s think about what she’s guilty of even if it were a spoiled little human brat. Yes, it’s her own money, and I’m sure her husband works hard for it, but does this couple have any sense of human decency?

What is it that makes these kind of people completely disregard the hardships of everyone else in the world? Are they so entrenched in their modelling / designer / financial careers that they’re blinded to their fellow man? Really, this makes me so sick. Did they actually make a concious decision when they purchased that Gucci bowl? Do they think wasting money – and let’s be in agreement here, this is wasting money – is cute? Do they actually have a severe psychological problem? Are they aware of anyone outside of their own pitiful existence? Arrrgh!

Thanks for reading if you made it this far – this isn’t my normal style, but sometimes I have to just let the rage loose,as there are things in this world are just so wrong. As ever, remember the reason you’re being frugal in your own life – to be able to help those who have been born into poverty and bad situations through no choice of their own. You however, have a choice. You can choose to not be selfish with your earnings. You can choose to purchase a no-brand shirt in lieu of that Armani one you’ve been eyeing. You can choose to be financially and ethically responsible. Act now to change the lives of those in need.