Today I write to you about the one thing which stops people from enjoying themselves in life, albeit in a rather paradoxical way; money. The problem is that I don’t have very much of it, which is quite a concern when I’m living in Tokyo. My money situation for my year abroad is as follows;
The (repayable!) student loan I’ll get is £4244, which at current exchange rates just covers the various things associated with my accommodation; the deposit, monthly rent, utilities, and bedding rental. After paying for all that with my student loan, I’ll have £26 left over. Not good when you consider that the transfer from the airport to the guesthouse on the first day costs £25.
Besides my student loan, I have about £2000 of my own, in savings and left over wages from Rhythm & Booze, and that’s it! I’m there for 10 months, so I somehow doubt that £50/week will be enough to survive off. Other than the basic every day survival-type things, there are of course all the other things I need to shell out for when I first get there, such as the compulsory Japanese National Heath Insurance (国民健康保険, or kokumin kenkou hoken), Certificates of Registration, a bicycle, and all that sort of thing.
Well, the solution is obvious, you may be thinking; get a job! But it is not so simple! To work in Japan on a student visa you need a work permit. As it’s in conjunction with said student visa, you have to go through the university to apply for it. But the catch is that my university won’t let you apply for one for a few months, to let you ‘settle in’ and to stop you from becoming too overwhelmed by the amount of things you take on. All I want is a few hours a week doing some English conversation! Apparently you can earn about £20 an hour just chatting in English! Obviously I’d put preparation in, but it does sound like a quite a good deal. Oh, and apparently British English is the new cool thing to learn in Japan, not the American English that everyone was brought up with…I’m not going to complain about that! I guess I'll just have to wait and see how the whole thing plays out.
But there is still one other avenue to explore! I got an email a week or so ago telling me that ICU had nominated me for a scholarship from the Takase Scholarship Foundation. They only award it to 20 people each year, but those who get it receive ¥100,000 (£770) every month from October until June! Obviously this would be an unimaginable help, so I really, really hope I get it. I’ve written the required 500-word essay for it, which I’ve sent to one of my Japanese tutors to translate, and now all I need to do is fill in the associated forms. I’ll find out whether I’ve got the scholarship or not in late September or early October, and I’ll definitely dedicate a post to that result on here!
That’s all for now! Oh, and sorry for the lack of pictures in this blog, I hope you made it to the end without getting bored!
James
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