yes, but shows Japan puts more effort not allowing Destitute travellers, from viedo they check more careful when you enter her.
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Is that $650 per hour? That is a lot like 18 euros per hour.
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That’s the starting rate for a buxiban teacher fresh out of university with a college degree in Taiwan. Occasionally they’ll try to pay lower but 650 is pretty much the standard.
if that per hour, a lot for Taiwanese 650x 40 hours week x 4 weeks month= 104,000,
kinda hard to say. Right now the KRW is really weak so if you’re going there with USD or other currencies it’s pretty cheap. Although the TWD is down recently (less than 10%) the KRW is down more like 30%. But prices in Korea seem to be higher. I was just there on a layover, so my only experience was stuff in a convenient store, but the cost of soft drinks or beer are definitely higher there even factoring in the weaker currency.
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I think I’ve seen jobs in Korea paying like 2.1-2.2 million KRW recently and that’s about what they would pay 15 years ago. Factor in inflation and their weak currency, it’s a really terrible deal. But they do pay for accomodation and the flight.
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Funny, fifteen years ago I rolled up to Japan with no reservations. Probably just wrote down the hostel in Kyoto I saw in the Lonely Planet guide, no real checking. Maybe things are different now?
A little later in the trip I was in Tokyo on a Saturday night in summer and for the life of me, I could not find any room at a hotel. I opted for an overnight stay at a love hotel as it was the only thing I could find, lol… Unfortunately I was not successful at Gas Panic that night and ended up in the love hotel alone. 
You can never get 40 hours that’s the rate for 20 teaching hours a week. It’s 650 an hour or 60,000 a month.
It might be possible to work two jobs if the jobs have premade materials with little preparation involved and make that much but you’ll be pretty exhausted. Usually contracts will stipulate no other jobs allowed
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nope.they question / check when they find you suspicious, same as most places, same as always.
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You might be able to get two cram school jobs with 20 hours each, but that would be physically taxing in a way that few people would be able to tolerate for more than a few weeks.
If there wasn’t such a massive problem with “discipline” nowadays and myths about “positive discipline” as some magical “if you’re always nice to the children they’ll eventually learn right from wrong so you should never ever tell them ‘no’ or correct their behavior for any reason” concept (positive discipline in actuality = authoritative, clear boundaries, clear consequences. Adult is neither friendly nor mean), it might be possible to roll up to a cram school, teach for 4 hours at one, take a quick break and commute over to another for another 4 hours, five days a week. But since name calling, climbing out windows, punching, shouting over people, and having meltdowns is a huge part of what happens when you just show up to a space where children are present in Taiwan, you’re starting off at 30% energy when you’d need that full charge if you want to make it through the day. 20 hours genuinely is the maximum amount of time even the most patient teachers can handle before the job wears down their sanity.
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True and the pay isn’t going up. The teaching industry is like the Titanic once great now sinking like a rock.
They even send back the hot girls?
Hey me too! Is Taipei Hostel still around?
Well for now it is. Because of greed. Once upon a time, the riches of the cram schools were shared with the teachers. But now the cram schools are just focused on taking parents’ money and putting the most willing to work for the lowest wages white face in the school. Not that any of the schools were of any quality in the first place. It’s just that now teachers who work there can barely make enough money to pay the bills whereas before it was really very good money…
(and I say “for now” because at some point something will take its place once there is a fall. But there needs to be a total crash that ends the industry almost completely first)
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I have not once in the past 15 years traveling to Japan been asked where am I going to stay. Nothing more than what area I will visit.
The landing card for noncitizens to enter Japan literally asks where you will be staying.
Guy
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I was always asked about specific hotels and even past travels. Same thing happened in Norway even though I was just passing through and didn’t even leave the Oslo airport. It was very annoying
It sure is.
I remember being there 12 years ago and seeing some real destitute teachers pass through. One woman was 40 something and had just lost a cram school job to “some kid who has never worked before in his life.” She looked like hell, missing teeth, bad skin, seriously looked like a meth addict or something. She would drink cooking wine to get drunk while crying on the edge of her bunk bed. She had been in Thailand before and I think she may have ended up in China.
Another guy was 50 something and also a complete drunk. Had no money, had just come from China and was trying to find work in Taipei. Pretty hard thing to do at his age. I remember he was talking about getting some money wired from a friend, just a few hundred bucks, complaining that it was taking so long, meanwhile, he was staying in one of the private rooms at the hostel and getting drunk pretty much every night.
Another old guy was staying there because he was getting a repatriation loan from AIT. Said he had worked as an engineer in Taichung for a long while. Claimed to have made a big salary down there, but had nothing to show for it, in fact, he was getting money from AIT so he could get back to the US.
Anyway, I was in my mid twenties back then, quite destitute myself. I had barely brought enough money with me to survive that first couple of months, and waited eagerly for my mom to wire me the money from my last paycheck at my job in the US. I managed to get a job that didn’t work out, it was kindy, and that’s really not my thing. I ended up staying there for months on and off as I was able to find some decent short term basically student accomodation elsewhere. But Taipei Hostel was where I would always fall back on. Eventually I found myself a proper job and got settled. I had no money to send home, so my student loans and credit card went unpaid for months. Took me years to rebuild my credit. Today, I don’t have any debt, have some cash and assets, and have a good job, a family and an APRC. It all started at Taipei Hostel. And I think seeing those destitute travelers I encountered there definitely provided some negative motivation, in that they made me think " I DO NOT want to end up like that."
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Funny how the beginning of our stories are so similar. But I came here several years earlier right out of college with $1500 to my name. I stayed at Taipei Hostel for a total of two days because I found an ad on Tealit called “Life for Sale” from a guy moving to Thailand. In exchange for nearly all of my money, I took over his apartment full of furniture, scooter, private English lessons and Kindy job. It was a gamble but it worked. I was making real money within a week of arriving.
I stayed for several years, learned the language and then went back to the US for grad school. Got a job off an unpaid internship (since all I had was teaching experience). Climbed quickly up the corporate ladder and became the youngest executive in my company. I then convinced my company to allow me to open a branch office in Taiwan. Now I’m on a gold card soon to be APRC and will apply for citizenship under the High Level Professional condition. Pretty sure I won’t get that though since I don’t have a Nobel Prize.
So yeah thanks Taipei Hostel.
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On such a card in my single days, I once wrote “inside a Ginza debutante.” 
I think the passport dude must have known a little English because he had a huge smirk on his face.