I am pretty sure that right now I am real life busto (have no money in Japan). But luckly I have some money online to sustain me till payday.

In December I booked my ticket back home. I get 12 days of paid leave a year. That’s right, averages out to 1 day off a month. But wait for it. Those 12 days include sick leave …

Unfortunately for me I took about 5-6 days off last year nursing injuries and sicknesses. Oh well, nothing like losing half of your yearly holiday at home in your sick bed. I hadn’t looked at how many days I had left when I booked my ticket. I assumed it was like 3-4 or something like that.

So I booked my ticket and went up to the admin lady and explain that I am leaving the 14th and will be back next year when work starts.

The lady logged on to the staff intranet to log the days I am taking off only to uncover that I am taking 9 days off but only have 0.5 days of holiday left…

So yeah it worked out as me being absent from work for 8.5 days. To make it worse since it was the last month of the year and the last few days were holidays, it somehow resulted in me losing half of my wages…

I got back from London and went to the ATM only to find out that I got paid enough for my rent, gym membership and internet bill to be debited from my account leaving me with enough change for a couple of hamburgers.

Kinda pissed off about that. I am the person in control of the intranet in my company and have the ability to fudge the numbers of my paid leave. But in such a small company I would probably get caught straight away

And if things couldn’t get any lamer I now have the taxman up my arse for taxes I somehow forgot to pay last year. In Japan apart from the normal tax that they rape from your paycheck there is another tax that gets sent to your house you have to pay. From June till the end of the year you have to make 4 x 40,000yen payments to your ward or something. That’s 160,000yen (1,755USD/1074GBP) a year of extra taxes.

The allure of working in Japan might be starting to wear off…

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