I used to teach English in Japan a while ago when I was very young and fresh-faced just out of university. The pay was awful and the hours were very long with very little holidays. Have the salaries risen a bit since then especially considering recent inflation etc.?
I’m currently working in China for a company that pays me about 420,000 yen a month and the hours are extremely low every day – are there any jobs that can come close to this and not have me doing crazy hours?
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Not really. Unless you’re a real teacher with real credentials. I’ve never heard of anyone getting paid more than 350k to teach where I’m from
Eikaiwa/ALT= 2 to 2.5 million yen a year.
Unaccredited international schools (and shit “IB” schools) and kindergarten= 1.5 to 2.5 million a year
IBDP= 3 to 5 million
Embassy endorsed, accredited international school= 4 to 15+ million yen a year depending on school and qualifications.
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This is Japan. You are going to work at least 9 hours a day unless you have the qualifications to jump straight into a tenured PhD research position. White monkey jobs are migrant worker jobs here.
I think the wages are getting lower. When I first started out 25K was the lowest wage but now I have been reading the starting wages for an ALT is 21K. Things are getting more expensive here with inflation and higher taxes.
There are some private schools in Tokyo that will offer in the 400-450k range for ALTs but they are not easy to come by and they have higher resume requirements.
Don’t quit your job and leave China if your goal is to make money.
China seems to be the new Japan, in the way Japan was during the bubble.
You seem to have gotten in on the scam early, so stay there. Reap the benefits and save money before the Chinese ESL market is flooded with barely useful idiots the way Japan has become. Then quit while you are ahead, go home, get a real career and use those savings on a down payment for a house – you win.
No, stay in China. I’m heading back after taking the leap. Japan has the worst working conditions I’ve ever experienced.
Just gotta be able to find the right places. I make 6m and have 7 weeks off a year. My hours are fine and my job is enjoyable most of the time
Wow, now I feel like looking into China.
“You got to lower your ideas of freedom if you want to suck on the warm teet of China. “
The JapanLife sub is constantly filled with posts asking for “the cheapest way to stay warm” or “the cheapest way to eat,” most of the teachers are basically on poverty level.
ALT is like 200k-240k a month and that’s without them paying your health insurance, pension, residence tax etc. A lot of ALT companies don’t pay for summer / spring holidays so it will be even less those months if it’s one of those companies. Eikaiwa is 250-280. International schools that hire without license credentials 250-300. Any higher than that would be teaching at an accredited international school or university but that will likely require a teaching license from home country, valid degrees, etc, and still may be less than what you’re currently making.
You’re definitely going to be working 9 hours a day, possibly overtime for the high end pay stuff. When I worked at an eikaiwa making 280k, we had to work 6 days a week around once every month or two for events.
Yeah as someone else said if your goal is to make money from teaching Japan is not the place. Teaching in Japan is to get a Japan experience for a year or few then go back or to get an easy visa into Japan then switch to another industry.
Expect half of that in Japan for an ALT position.
I don’t know about International schools, but you could earn that much if you had a full schedule of part-time university classes. That’s also taking in to consideration the 3-4 months holiday you have without any classes. It takes time to build up a full schedule though, and there is very little job security, as many people found out over COVID. Part-time university work is becoming much more competitive though, because it is one of the only places left that English teachers can make a decent salary.
Japan is hiring teachers from the Philippines and India now to keep wages low. The manpower agencies take half the money like a pimp.
> I’m currently working in China for a company that pays me about 420,000 yen a month and the hours are extremely low every day…
Don’t fall for the troll post. China’s closed to foreigners and its equivalent of eikaiwa was closed to non-Chinese years back.
The best advise I hear and have to remind myself over and over again is, “vacation in Japan, don’t work there”. Sad but true.
Remember to take all comments with a pinch of salt, this is reddit afterall. ALT salary is low but for the work it’s probably calculated just about right. Not sure about smaller dispatch companies but Interac pay 50% for August and 75% for the three week winter holiday. I teach 2-3 lessons per day as T2 and for the free’s im just browsing amazon,youtube,reddit etc which i’m doing now. Easy work for easy money.
Unless you can get a Uni teaching job or find a direct hire with a board of education the move isn’t going to be worth it. Average salary is too low here and there’s too many people who will flock here and take that poverty wage.
>The pay was awful
It still is for eikaiwa and ALT positions, unless you’re working several side jobs. University teaching is better.
>the hours were very long with very little holidays.
Eikaiwa work has very long hours with few holidays. ALT work and university work offer better working conditions.
As someone who was a teacher in China that moved to Japan….. stay in China. The “freedoms” (internet, foreign products, less security, foreign watchers) are exponentially less, the quality of life was hands down better in China. Savings were better in China. Vacations were better in China.
Honestly, just traveling during your holidays in China for a month or so wherever you want, at least for me, would be enough.
If I could redo some things, I would stay in China. Japan is great but monetarily, China is superior.
Oh and you know how you don’t pay taxes in China….. you’ll have to pay residence tax in Japan. Which is a nice little chunk every 3 months
You’d have to pay me ten times that to live in China. Probably not even then.
There are quite a few comments here about China having better salary & working conditions than Japan for English teachers, and how the pay offs aren’t really that important if you aren’t trying to be political and change the country.
When I worked in China, another teacher in my city had a traffic accident when he was riding his motorbike. The son of the woman he collided with decided that he was going to milk this foreigner – the police took away the guy’s passport and told him he was not allowed to leave – he had to stay and pay.
If the police never pay attention to you, then that’s fine. But if you get unlucky, the justice system is not going to be on your side.
If you are in China, you need to keep squeaky clean and make sure there’s as little that the police can use against you as possible. I think anyone choosing China needs to keep that very much at the front of their mind.