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The story
“Isn’t it crazy to spend more than an hour and a half commuting?” — that post kicked off a wide-ranging debate on 5ch about commute times. Users shared stories of commutes stretching from 20 minutes to 2 hours after company-mandated transfers, and confessions of losing 4 hours a day round-trip, before the discussion expanded into whether remote work is the answer and how it factors into buying versus renting a home.
What people said
Exactly this.
My commute went from 20 minutes to 2 hours too.
Just move, then.
That's a precious hour out of 24 wasted every single day.
I'm wasting a full 4 hours a day on my commute.
It's brutal.
But being able to walk to work is amazing, isn't it?
Your mornings are way less rushed.
Round-trip, that's totally fine then.
Winner in life.
With a job like that you can live anywhere.
Seriously jealous.
About 90 minutes, huh.
That's pretty far.
Also, whether you can get a seat matters a lot on a long commute.
I can even eat lunch at home.
During COVID I was the only one who had to come in to answer phones, and having the whole office to myself was actually a fun change of pace.
But your world really shrinks.
You stop leaving your own neighborhood.
I live in a town I actually like, so to me that only sounds like a plus…
Both Ueno and Abiko are terminal stations, so apparently he could always get a seat (the Joban Line only ran as far as Ueno back then).
Still, that must've been rough.
It's rough… At first you think you'll use the commute productively, like studying for certifications, but whether it's exhaustion or what, you just end up sleeping the whole way.
It's my own home, so it's not that simple to just…
They say commute time and odds of getting depressed rise together.
Not sure owning a home is worth that much, though.
My department head owns a house too, but on top of that he rents his own apartment — a 3-minute walk from the office, same as me.
Are people just stupid?
Any job that can go remote should just go remote, full stop.
Trains would be less packed too.
That's kind of sad…
How long is your commute?
Still, there's something to be said for feeling settled and being able to lose yourself in a hobby, so I want to go home to my own house.
What kind of hobby can you only do if you own your home?
Model building and playing instruments…
Instruments do seem pretty rough to keep up in a rental.
I get that, but
there are things you just can't do unless it's your own place…
At first you always think you'll put the time to good use somehow…
So true.
Even company-paid transit allowances get taxed, so the farther and pricier your commute, the more you lose out.
Waking up, breakfast, getting ready: 1 hour
Commute (round trip): 4 hours
Work hours: 8 hours
Lunch break: 1 hour
Prep before clocking in: 30 minutes
So that's about 14.5 hours a day spent on work-related stuff?
And after you get home there's still prepping for tomorrow and answering emails.
That's 3 hours a day burned just commuting.
Can you handle that?
Background and Key Points
Japan’s commuting culture rests on two institutions foreign readers may not know. First, *tsuukin teate* (commuting allowance): employers reimburse train/bus fares, and by law this reimbursement is tax-exempt up to ¥150,000 a month — so poster 44’s complaint that “even the allowance gets taxed” only applies to the portion above that generous threshold, not to a typical commute. Second, *tenkin/tenpu* (company-ordered transfers): large Japanese firms can reassign salaried employees to a distant office or branch with little negotiation, which is why poster 2’s one-line complaint (“the company just transfers you without asking”) lands as self-evidently unfair to other posters rather than being challenged — it’s a structural feature of lifetime-employment-style firms, not a personal choice. Average one-way commutes in greater Tokyo run 40-50 minutes, so a 90-minute trip is long but not unusual for people living in Chiba, Ibaraki, or Kanagawa exurbs and working in central Tokyo.
The thread doesn’t actually split over whether long commutes are bad — everyone agrees they are. The real fault line is what to do about it: accept it as a trade-off for homeownership and a settled neighborhood (posts 28, 31, 35), or treat remote work as the obvious fix and wonder why companies are pulling back from it (30, 33). A second, smaller split is over proximity itself — some want distance from coworkers (10), others prize the short commute anyway (19, 24).
What’s missing is scale: national survey data (comparable to Japan’s own Housing and Land Survey) puts the *average* Japanese commute closer to 40 minutes round trip, meaning this thread’s participants, self-selected into an “over 90 minutes” discussion, aren’t representative of typical commuters.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Anyone who spends more than 90 minutes commuting is an idiot.”
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