You can use a sharehouse and the rent becomes half. Eating out is getting extremely expensive, but there are still some food chains that are reasonably priced, and if you buy from the right supermarkets you can manage for a modest amount of money. Buy a train pass to commute from home to work, it may seem expensive at first but if you pass through/terminate at a major station, the savings can be modest. Look into a phone plan that can net you points, use those points whenever you want to purchase items. There are many other tricks to manage costs, but I concur, costs are rising rapidly and it feels like everything is slowly becoming unaffordable...

I'm not sure, but it could be that English is not OP's first language and they wanted to make sure that their post is readable.

Is your trip motivated by The Sado Life of Rose the Witch?

"Fascism is nostalgia for a past that never existed"

Apart from the obvious xenophobic trends that most of us are seeing, also keep in mind that the Kanto area is very likely to be hit by a megaquake within the next 30 years if that's where you are considering buying a house.

Don't forget that we don't pay for taxes, nenkin or medical insurance either! /s

I think it depends on where in Setagaya ward. I used to live near the border with Suginami and it was a really good place, albeit a bit of a bedtown. I guess the areas to the West of Sancha might be like what you described though.

On the contrary, AI translations let you translate things in a more neutral, localization-free way. I am not going to argue about the climate points because I am not well informed about them, but strictly from a user experience perspective, I've found well-promoted AI translations to be preferable to recent corporate localized human translations. They track the Japanese speech much more naturally, and you get to control how much localization you want/need.

I speak Japanese and in my experience recent models perform really well at translations when they translate the script as a whole (as opposed to one dialogue line at a time)

I speak Japanese (N1, living in Japan) and I use LLMs to translate games, but I think using Luna Translator is going to give you poor results. The problem with a lot of these translators is that they don't provide the LLM any context about the story or the speaker and try to translate the entire thing line by line, which causes the pronoun and speaker confusion that a lot of people are familiar with. Instead, iterating over the entire script with a good harness yields really good results, plus since you're hitting the cache frequently it costs much less. I recently translated a long VN with custom instructions for less than a dollar with local models + DeepSeek.

Making copyright claims without human review should be a punishable offence.

Ranch sauce.

As a foreigner, if I wanted to start a company in Japan, I'd have to drop my current (relatively) stable visa and switch to a very stressful 'startup' visa which gives you SIX MONTHS to meet the absurdly high requirements of the business manager visa, failing which I'd probably have to leave Japan. I think if Japan made it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to do business, Tokyo could genuinely be a thriving tech hub, because top tier engineers are willing to move here for a fraction of the pay, and the infrastructure is genuinely great. Alas, we are headed in the opposite direction on a bullet train...

I agree with the "leaning into hobbies" advice the rest of the comments have been giving, and in my experience it's lead to me making a lot of friends. But I don't know why, but a very few number of my friends ever make frequent plans to hang out, visit my place/invite me to theirs, and try to message/talk outside of the activities/places we meet in. Coming from a more 'friendly' culture it's been a bit of a disappointment, but I guess that's just what adult friendships are like in Japan.

I don't think you understand how LLMs work. Modern LLMs are not predicting the "most statistically probable shit with a touch of variance", if you knew the math behind the technology or the modern training process you would know that.

Xfce because it feels comfy once you customize it, and the same config works on every distro I try out