Comment by flanbiscuit

To be clear, in the last one year, the Japanese yen vs US dollar has declined by about 23%: 148 JPY/USD vs 114 JPY/USD. As a result, "dollarised" Tokyo real estate suddenly looks very cheap. For foreign investors / foreign captial, yes, this is true. For local residents / local investors, there is still almost zero inflation here. As a result, local real estate prices are mostly unaffected by USD/JPY FX rates.

When looking at real estate expenses from perspective of local residents, it is always best to look at local currency median income. If median income or real estate prices are unchanged relative to local currency median income, who cares(!). The rest is just an article in a financial newspaper!

We need a disclaimer since from ~last month FX has gone crazy, whether we are using old or new numbers. For me I'm still thinking 10万円 is:

USD ~1000 (a bit less, but just insignificant)

EUR 800~900

And virtually all articles you find today regarding real estate, USD vs JPY, etc. will be talking with old numbers. It's important to talk about the new numbers, but I'd wait a bit for them to stabilize before being "acktually the yen now is" in articles (I'm not saying parent comment is doing that, just warning that those people are everywhere).

In terms of costs of living and salary percentage, 100,000 yen feels like it's around $1000 or so.

For context, a new grad will probably end up making around 200,000 - 250,000 yen (before taxes) a month at a lot of places.

Note that the JPY lost about 30% of value this year, while rent (nor wages, nor cost of living) haven't caught up to those figures. For the past few years, the JPY/USD rate was around 110.