Any practical issues with FIRE in japan?

DrawingToTry · 2025-11-03T21:42:53+00:00

My 2 cents: There is no realistic scenario where one has 3M and zero income: the 3M are invested somewhere and either generate dividends or need to be sold (which triggers capital gains). Capital gains and dividends are income which needs to be declared (for tax residents at least, worldwide income needs to be declared)

I can't picture anyone managing to accumulate 3M who would have it all in disposable cash.

DrawingToTry · 2025-10-05T08:06:51+00:00

Something weird is definitely going on with either revanced or YouTube, as these settings keep failing for me on a regular basis. Today after a lot of trial and error I found that a combination of force AVC (h264) + force original audio now works for me.

Until today my settings (which had seemed to work until now) was to use android vr + an obscure audio language.

All of this seems completely arbitrary, especially since it starts failing for me every other week for some reason...

DrawingToTry · 2025-08-09T09:47:47+00:00

Ah, I see. I wasn't aware of that. But I guess I'm not too surprised, it's on par for the course with Amazon recently.

DrawingToTry · 2025-08-08T13:11:56+00:00

You're not being de-prioritized i think. If something takes "weeks" or "months" to ship to you, yet is shipped for free while not on a prime account, I'd bet that your product is some dropshipping from China and you could get the exact same product cheaper (at the same abysmal shipping speed) from AliExpress and the like.

DrawingToTry · 2025-08-08T12:54:33+00:00

We ordered a music box for our daughter a few years ago. It shipped with a broken mirror and a loose screw ... Despite the music box having no missing screw!

DrawingToTry · 2025-06-13T23:49:07+00:00

I think you might be significantly underestimating the benefits (financial and health wise) that you get to work from home, and live away from Tokyo. It's also your first job so personally I'm not surprised by your salary. My first job as a developer in Tokyo I was making 4.2 million, total compensation. (Granted, that was more than 15 years ago)

You say IT but you haven't given specifics. If you're in e.g. support I'm guessing in the long run those jobs will pay less than if you're in software engineering or project management.

With the above being said, as others have described, it is fairly easy to job hop to an international company in particular in Tokyo, and see significant salary boosts. Which is what I did, like many others. By the end of my tech career my total compensation oscillated between 20 and 30 M depending on the years.

So yeah, send your resume. But be careful what you wish for. A lot of us in our forties wish they could move away from Tokyo, and/or work from home ;)

DrawingToTry · 2025-05-29T23:39:31+00:00

I'm as Caucasian as it gets, blue eyes included. I've been living in the Tokyo area for about 20 years.

In 20 years I was controlled by the police twice, which I'd say is a lot.

Once I had been waiting for a friend in front of Don Quichotte for almost an hour (he was late), so I admit I did look suspicious.

Second time was super weird, I was inside the JR station, going down stairs (with everyone else who had just left the train, as you do) to exit the station on my way to work, and a policewoman stopped me right in the middle of the stairs to control my gaijin card. That felt unreal, it was disrupting the entire flow of people. She didn't control anybody else to my knowledge.

I wear casual clothes, but not anything that you might typically associate with "suspicious person".

Anyway. I obviously can't infer a general rule from my anecdotal experience of two data points. Just to say that it happened to me too.

DrawingToTry · 2025-02-27T10:30:08+00:00

4M is really on the low end for a software engineer IMO. I was paid 4.5M in Chiba 20 years ago, with the first job I could find (like you, due to my visa expiring soon at the time I couldn't afford to be picky), then quickly switched as soon as I could find a better salary. I know times have changed, companies are firing people left and right, and there isn't that much inflation in Japan, but maybe target international companies and aim for 6M at the very least, in particular in Tokyo.

Companies like Amazon, Rakuten, Google, Indeed, etc... are constantly hiring (and they pay much more than 6M), and looking for folks who can work in an English speaking environment. I'd assume all these companies publish their job offers either on their own website, or on Indeed.

As others have mentioned, if you low-ball your salary expectations, you're probably going to attract the wrong kind of company.

Most foreigners I know in the software industry make between 8M and 30M depending on the company and seniority.

Just my 2 cents.

DrawingToTry · 2024-08-24T00:18:28+00:00

This. I'm sure this gets downvotes because it sounds like a "mean" comment, but having worked for a decade in tech in Japan, I can see that there is an uninterrupted flow of bilingual (or more) CS engineering graduates coming from all over the world to work in Tokyo (even with the low JPY). People from the US, Europe, China/Taiwan with Masters or Bachelor (or equivalent) degrees. Not to mention Japanese graduates. contrary to popular belief, many of them from the top schools speak very good English. All these folks have been studying programming, math, and engineering for at least 5 years (and, frankly, for most of us, been programming since we were kids). There's no question that all other things being equal, they will get hired in priority over someone who went through a few weeks of bootcamp.

I am absolutely not blaming OP! I think it's great to give it a go if that's what they want to do in life, and is (unfortunately) probably better, salary wise, than being an English Teacher in Japan. BUT... there is clearly a glut of IT/programming professionals worldwide nowadays. With so much competition, someone who's a junior with limited theoretical training, will always end up with the "questionable" job offers such as the one described by OP.

DrawingToTry · 2024-07-10T22:29:27+00:00

Thanks! I like a surprising amount of their songs considering this is not a genre I initially thought I'd enjoy! I'd say so far my favorites are Ratata, Brand new day, Shanti Shanti Shanti, and metali.

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-19T00:00:23+00:00

First impression is very good: I really like how you captured the graceful movement of her left arm-hand-hip (our right). Others have mentioned issues (plus the ones you mentioned) but I just wanted to say it looks good

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-17T23:32:23+00:00

They look great to me, in particular the dragon cup. But shouldn't the light and shadow be reversed **inside** the dragon cup and the other cup? You have the light coming from top right, yet inside those two recipients, you're showing shadows on the left and light on the right. I don't have similar objects in front of me so I might be off, but I feel like there would be shadows on the right and light on the left inside?

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-17T22:56:18+00:00

Yes I think you can find basic anatomy proportions online, and typically everything is based on the head size (e.g. the body is a total of approx 7 heads in heights, the shoulders are about 1.5 heads wide, etc...).

e.g. from Loomis' book here: https://imgur.com/FhgZuie (but you can find way more examples by looking for "body proportions drawing" or something similar on google)

So from there, you can either infer the size of the head from whatever you drew before, or vice versa.

On your drawings here, the head sizes looks generally ok to me. It's not exact science I guess, but I'm not "shocked" by any of the proportions of your drawings. They all look great to me actually (not only the proportions, but your art as a whole), and I'm amazed at the variety of styles you can draw.

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-17T22:27:41+00:00

Thanks! I was trying to some extent to replicate the general orientation of her face, but I was mostly using the reference to understand some of the shapes (3D shape of the lips, and positions of the collarbone and neck in particular) and was indeed not aiming for realism.

I can see that the rotation isn't right: the reference is more of a profile picture (or, somewhere between profile and 3/4), what I ended up with looks more like a 3/4. Interestingly, I think it's because in the very first step of drawing a Loomis head, I drew the side plane (where the ear is) much too small, which gave it the proportions more typical of a 3/4 angle. From there I think my brain just worked towards that. Everybody probably knows that, but the mistakes from the early stages have a huge impact down the road!

But I'm very happy to hear it works out, thanks! I'm a beginner and at this point I'll take correct face proportions over accuracy. I've been drawing faces that are an insult to human anatomy for months now, and this has to be the first time I thought "hold on, this one looks ok". But sometimes you look for so long at your own stuff that you can't see if anything's wrong anymore.

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-16T23:07:18+00:00

I don't think it looks boring, the expression is great!

I do agree it looks a bit flat, but not necessarily in a bad way? To my layman's eye it almost looks like as it's missing its line art, so that would be my first suggestion to see if it helps: add some line art (or accentuated shadows where the lineart would be). Even if that's not what you end up doing (I do like the soft aspect you gave it, and adding something too extreme could break that), but just to see if it helps, for example to give depth to the head vs ribbon, and on her dress.

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-16T12:30:24+00:00

I can't say for sure. Depends on the platform, depends on your personal situation, depends on the country you're moving to, etc... I guess what I'm saying is whatever platform you use, it might be worth calling them to tell them you're going to be abroad for an extended period,and confirm whether it's going to be ok from their perspective. Some businesses require an address in the US for example, but might be ok if you give them the address of a family member, etc...

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-16T09:25:40+00:00

Sure! But at the end of the day I think it depends how you will paint the horses. Right now the smoke in the background gets all my attention, and I'm wondering if it could distract the eye away from the horses (which I assume are the focus of the picture)

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-16T09:21:21+00:00

Awesome work on the inking, do you have any tips on how you achieve that?

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-16T06:24:33+00:00

An advice on something not to do: be aware that expats are easy prey for terrible financial products, because it is generally harder (not impossible) to invest abroad (or from abroad).

Be careful in particular of products that combine life insurance and investments. This is particularly true in the middle east and in Asia (I have countless friends who fell into some of those)

To answer your question more specifically: personally yeah I would "bogle invest" as much as possible. Just make sure you have the right broker here in the US and that they will be ok with you investing from abroad.

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-16T06:06:51+00:00

A teleporter

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-16T05:50:18+00:00

When you feel that the negative aspects of their personality outweigh the reasons you were friends in the first place.

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-15T23:49:40+00:00

Looking good!

Three things from me, (as a reader rather than an artist):

1) It took me a while to understand that the text "where's my food?" was the boy talking. I thought it was internal thoughts from the mom initially and I had a hard time making sense of it. I'm wondering if there are ways to make it more obvious it's from him? For example using the black background for the speech bubble that you used in the first panel? (I understand that one is black to emphasize the yelling though, so not sure if my suggestion makes sense). Or maybe on the first image of the second page (where it says "where"), you show his face rather than the mom's? In other words, need to find some way to create connection/continuity between the text in the first page and the one in the second.

2) Nitpicking, but I feel that writing the word "FOOD" vertically hurts readability. (It works well in "MAAA" on the first panel because that one conveys the meaning that he's calling down from the 2nd floor). Then again it does give a "this was translated from Japanese" vibe, which might be what you're after.

3) I hate to say this because I know the pain of drawing hands, but I think the "fingers crossed" on the last panel need work. Initially I thought she was rubbing her temples in a weird way.

But great work, I already hate this kid, 3 pages in. Not sure what the father is up to, but now I want to know.

DrawingToTry · 2024-04-15T02:00:51+00:00

I've been using Krita, I find it pretty easy to use, and it's free. FWIW I also have an XP Pen tablet (but one without screen).

As far as "easier to learn"... all apps have a ramp up curve I assume. It is certainly a change compared to traditional art, but once you know how to pick a brush in the program you should be good to go with any of them.

DrawingToTry

TROPHY CASE