If you're disciplined about it, English teaching in Japan / Korea is also a decent option, depending on whether you end up with better deals. (Humming a few bars: JET salaries in this prefecture are $45k per year post-tax, rents are subsidized in this town to $80 a month, and the Japanese equivalent of the social security tax which your employer is paying ~10% of your salary to is 100% yours when you leave.)
That said: generic non-JET English teachers have it kind of rough (worse salaries and conditions), people's enjoyment of their time is all over the map (depends on who you are and where you end up), and English teaching is notorious for having few forward paths out of it.
In Japan, consumptions taxes are very low (at least compared to Europe, I am not too familiar with comsuption tax rate in the US). If you don't have a family, you often don't need a car thanks to a great public transportation system (never driven a car in 7 years since I am in Japan), which is a lot of spared money as well. Food is expensive, but restaurants are cheap (you can find a lot of restaurants with good, healthy meals, for a price not higher than Mc Donalds).
As for the - of Japan (compared to western Europe): the health system which is borderline scary in terms of service and quality, and the housing. Unless you can afford the expensive stuff, most housing is really low quality (no acoustic/heat isolation, etc...), without mentioning the obvious size issue.
That's really surprising on the health care front. I think many westerners (myself included) think of Japan as a paragon of efficiency and effectiveness in nearly everything.
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with the system?
I haven't lived in Japan, but my understanding is that it is bizarre. For instance they don't do organ transplants at all. period. none. They also visit the doctor 15 times per year on average, which means they go to the doctor when they are not actually sick, so the doctors are in the habit of not actually treating anyone.
Japan may have the highest life expectancy of any country in the world, but Japanese people in the US live about 5 years longer on average than Japanese people in Japan.
Of course, it's hardly clear that this effect is caused by health care. Most studies with good controls show very little relationship between variation in health care and health outcomes. (To measure the effect of lifestyle factors on health outcomes, you need a few hundred people for clear results. To measure the effect of health care on health outcomes, sample sizes of thousands give you muddled results.)
I've not had personal experience with this although I go to Japan relatively frequently, but I remember reading a scathing review of the Japanese health system, I think it was in the Lonely Planet. I'll look for it when I go home. I was also surprised since due to the general efficiency of everything and longevity of the people I was expecting the system to be amazing, but they painted a truly scary picture of it.
First, for a foreigner, there is obviously the language factor, but that's a given wherever you go in a country where you don't master the language.
Whenever I went to a doctor for relatively minor things, they wanted to give me some pills. Generally, I got the impression that they just want to treat the symptoms rather than fixing the actual cause of the issue. Dental is so scary that I have never been there: people I know who went for minor things had to battle not to get their tooth removed for the most benin infection. Treatment of orthopedia also "looks" scary, although I don't have first hand experience with it: you see quite a lot of people, young people, with significant issues. I don't know the explanation for that (lifestyle being a huge factor obviously, it would need a real statistical study to actually know something there).
The only times where I was under the impression I had someone who knew what he was doing was when I went to a university hospital, but I don't have easy access to that anymore.
It is also extremely unpersonal, but I am willing to concede that's mostly cultural.
i've also heard that JET experiences were all over the map. for example, i know one guy who spent most of his time cleaning.
on a slightly different topic, do you have any thoughts on the availability of non-teaching positions for people who don't have business fluency? i know there are some, but the bulk of jobs for foreigners are clearly in language and cultural instruction.
That actually isn't correct: the bulk of jobs for foreigners are in factories. Assuming we scope this to "licit jobs a middle class American would actually consider doing", illiteracy is about as big a barrier to gainful professional employment as one would expect. The exceptions are English teaching, service work at particular bars/etc, and doing weddings as a fake minister (orders of magnitude rarer than teaching).
In particular, so help me, I was ready to kill interviewees at a Japanese megacorp who expected to be placed as engineers despite total inability to read a design document or discuss technical topics. ("No! It is not kawaii that you cannot describe what the black boarded algorithm does in Japanese. No! Knowing the word "kawaii" is not worth points on your application.")
Or you could work for an American company in Japan where they work in English. For those who want to write software in the middle of Shibuya, my team and a couple others at Amazon are hiring :)
the difficulty there (as it relates to this article, at least) is whether or not they'll sponsor someone's visa. it seemed difficult for a friend of mine to find something that would.
I only officially have a 2kyuu, although that is mostly a function of never organizing myself to take the 1kyuu exam. Our company required only "advanced proficiency in written and oral Japanese", and due to process defects that I will not go into, that filter was not rigorously applied until frustratingly late in the pipeline in some cases.
I know of some engineers in Tokyo who I would guess have actual ability closer to "exactly sufficient to pass 2kyuu". Never met anyone below that working in a professional capacity.
Hmm...I would say my experience has been the opposite, and in Tokyo, 2kyuu is rather closer to the high end of the spectrum.
When I first came to Japan, I basically didn't speak any Japanese, but managed to get a job as a software developer in Tokyo. There are lots of companies (especially in the financial sector) that value English over Japanese here.
If you are a desk jockey, the best jobs in Japan are with foreign financial firms like Morgan Stanley. They pay a lot, you don't need to know Japanese, they hook you up with housing, you don't have crazy Japanese hours or crazy American finance hours, and the hiring standards are a lot looser than their US or UK equivalents.
That said: generic non-JET English teachers have it kind of rough (worse salaries and conditions), people's enjoyment of their time is all over the map (depends on who you are and where you end up), and English teaching is notorious for having few forward paths out of it.