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The story
A thread about Tokyo rent versus income, posted on the “Live Anything” board (Nandemo Jikkyo G), blew up. It kicked off with an image comparing average rent for 1K apartments in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Fukuoka, and quickly spiraled into inter-city bickering: “Nagoya pays about the same as Tokyo but rent is half — way better value” versus “yeah, but the manners and public order there are terrible.” Commenters also clashed over whether the widely cited ¥4 million annual income figure was a mean or a median, trading rebuttals sourced from Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare statistics. The thread also touched on low disposable income, real examples of cut-rate apartments in central Tokyo, and whether the crime-rate rankings being cited were even accurate.
What people said
Tokyo
Osaka
Nagoya
Fukuoka
Fukuoka's way too high for being in the middle of nowhere
Didn't realize Osaka salaries were this low
Same pay as Tokyo but half the rent
But the city's a hellscape — Sakae is literally the only thing there
At ¥160 to the dollar, ¥4 million a year is only $2,500 a month… wait, $25,000 a year
Back when ¥100 to the dollar was normal, that same $25,000 would've only been ¥2.5 million 😭
Why would a regular salaryman even think in dollars
Still, living in Tokyo is about as bad as it gets
Nagoya's manners are so bad you can't really call it good value
Tokyo's manners are honestly worse
It's a big city where you can live in a spacious, clean home, earn good pay, and find work — that's plenty of performance
It's the median, so Tokyo is a city with nearly 10 million of those "losers"
Sendai and Sapporo have low pay and no jobs
Nagoya has plenty of jobs and good pay
Crime rate rankings
1st: Tokyo
2nd: Osaka
3rd: Kanagawa
6th: Aichi (Nagoya's prefecture)
https://www.alsok.co.jp/person/recommend/dangerous-ranking2024/
The police don't publish per-capita stats anymore, but if you actually calculate it, has Tokyo really overtaken Osaka as the overwhelming worst?
I guess five years is enough time for that to happen
Even calculating from the official 2025 stats, Osaka's still #1 — what ranking is this even from?
And it's unpopular because it's a pain to live in
Of course it is
It's just that Tokyoites who happily live downtown or on reclaimed landfill are the weird ones
Yeah, that's actually true
It's fighting for dead last in disposable income nationwide
Though for families raising kids, the subsidies are pretty generous
Still, having kids pushes the rent you need even higher
If you look at men only, the national median easily clears ¥5 million, and I'd guess it's around ¥6 million for Tokyo alone
No point arguing with numbers that lump in part-time housewives
This is full-time employees only, by the way
If Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya all come in below the national stats that include part-timers, something's off
Pensioners are probably mixed into that data too
The latest Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare median for full-time employees is ¥3.7 million
You're mixing that up with the average
The average is around ¥5 million
There's probably a limit to how many workers you can pull in from outside the city too
That's exactly why they're bringing in tens of thousands of foreign technical intern trainees
Only ¥100,000 a month! Such a deal!
Looks like it's for "convict-tier" guys (a joke term for men who'll live in rooms as spartan as a prison cell)
After all that, a shared toilet is still a dealbreaker?
Standing in line for over an hour just to save ¥500-600 seems like a terrible use of your hourly wage, no?
Meanwhile
Osakans: "We love Gindako!" ❤
Where's this ¥4 million figure even coming from?
Plenty of Tokyoites make under ¥4 million too, you know
¥4 million is the median
It reflects reality better than the average does
Background and Key Points of the Debate
What sparked the debate in the thread was how to interpret the figure “¥4 million a year.” According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s Basic Survey on Wage Structure, the median annual income for full-time employees sits around ¥3.7 million, while the average climbs into the ¥5 million range. The median reflects the reality of the “person in the middle,” whereas the average tends to get pulled upward by high earners — so the same data set can leave very different impressions depending on which figure you look at. There’s no question Tokyo’s rents are among the highest in the country, but its low disposable income comes down to the heavy burden of rent, cost of living, and social insurance premiums — a high salary alone doesn’t guarantee breathing room. The thread also lit up with comparisons to Nagoya and Osaka, but judgments about “manners” and “public order” are largely based on personal impressions and should be read separately from official crime statistics.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (“Live Anything G”) board thread “[Sad News] Tokyoite Only Makes ¥4 Million a Year, Yet Rent Alone Eats at Least ¥100,000“.
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