This is a general question for anyone living in the Tohoku area. How do/did you find a job with a decent salary out here? Almost every job I’ve applied to only offers 20万 a month, regardless of industry, before taxes and thats only barely enough to cover expenses. I don’t eat out, I don’t have streaming services, I don’t drink, the most I’ve splurged on myself out here recently was when I bought an extra bag of chai tea mix.
I have a few years of engineering and translator experience but none of that seems to matter because of the 年功制度 bs. I like where I live in Tohoku, I don’t want to move, but the way things are going staying here doesn’t seem realistic in the long term.
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Do they offer other benefits? 200,000 is not uncommon for a base salary but some places may offer other benefits or allowances that makes the situation… well suck a bit less.
I worked in Sendai as a semicon engineer which had a base salary of 219,000 + 40,000 regional allowance and had 3x monthly base salary bonus distributed twice a year. Though they expected 40 hours overtime per month but I could only do like 25 or so. All in all my take home amount was like 5.5M before taxes.
It depends which field of Engineering you are into but in the Tohoku region, there are scattered factories and R and D centers here and there. For example Kioxia has semicon fab in Kitakami Iwate, Sony has some R and D center in Yamagata. For IT, the only place I can think of is Iris Ohyama whose HQ is in Sendai. They have been making quite an effort to expand into the IOT space. Else you can try to find an IT job in Tokyo that allows Remote work from the Tohoku region.
Get a full remote job
I am in a biomedical R&D and I left Tohoku (Sendai) because of the lack of opportunities for good jobs and living as well.
In general, Kanto/Kansai is where people go to later
The average salary in Akita is 24.5万 a month and it’s similar in the rest of Tohoku. I’m assuming there’s no foreign companies there, and you’d be new to the company so 20万 seems average. You might get 2 bonuses a year if you’re lucky though. I’m on 16万 and live in the chugoku region. I also would rather stay here than move to Tokyo, but it’s pointless living here if you can’t even enjoy life.
20万/mon is good for about a 4 bedroom house in Iwate.
I was lucky to get invited for a senior position at a huge new project, but those are far and few in-between. The best I can say is read the news and look for big investments and things happening, and try to get in at the lowest floor.