Fun with Math

Just for the record, for those that think being a JET is high pay for little work (it's sort of the opposite, actually).

Here's my actual pay for July: 69,230 yen (a yen is roughly equal to a cent).
Not bad, considering I wasn't working in Japan for the whole month.

Here's what they took out:

13,846 Tax
13,940 Mandatory Health Insurance
23,086 Mandatory Pension
------
50,872 Total

Now, the tax is theoretically refundable (haven't got that one sorted out yet, but I've only been trying for three months). The Mandatory payments are the full payments for every month, even though I was only working in Japan for the last six days of July. I thought that was tough at first, but then I heard that Japanese citizens have to make the Mandatory pension payments whether or not they are actually employed, so it's not like the US Social Security system.

So, my total, take home for 6 days work was: 18,358, which is about $30 a day, or (assuming an 8 hour day [ha!]) less than $4 an hour.

Also, bear in mind that, according to the brochure from the international office of my prefecture (which wants to present the most positive image it can), it only costs slightly more than $100 a day to live in Fukui!

Wasn't that fun?