Maybe you got confused because China, Japan and Korea group numbers by powers of 10 000 ("man")? Now a 1000-man (10 million yen, around 90k USD or 75k EUR) salary would be amazing, the average Japanese salary is 3 million yen.
> That's a ridiculously low salary here, fine for a college kid with a part time job ("arubaito") at your local konbini, but not much else.
True -- min wage is 1000 yen, not hard to work out the lowest theoretical yearly salary would be with a 5 day work week. The usual exception of waiters that are below the min wage isn't here since the service sector generally doesn't do tipping.
> Maybe you got confused because China, Japan and Korea group numbers by powers of 10 000 ("man")?
Yup this is exactly it. Can't get used to dealing with that extra order of magnitude.
The worst part is trying to read out loud a number. It's fine when you see a number like 1億6432万4871 and you know exactly where the splits are, but most of the time they will just use commas as thousand separators and write numbers as 164,324,871, and then it becomes really difficult to parse numbers, even for them.
Yep, or trying to figure this out in front of someone you're making a deal with -- normally I'm all alone writing an estimate/invoice when I'm figuring out. Sales in japan is one part of the japanese business experience that I do not do, and avoid every time I can.
Most of the time I just do everything in dollars -- Americans have a reputation for thinking of everything in American terms, so why disappoint? On a serious note though, a lot of local counterparties are fine doing things in dollars here as well.
Anyway, you are lucky, as the dollar/yen exchange ratio is close to 100, so you can drop or add two zeroes and get a good approximation. For us the euro/yen ratio is around 130, such an approximation would introduce too much error.
Is the japanese word for a part-time job really the german word 'Arbeit'? Amusing.