Informal Guide > [Admission Process], [Course Description], [Living Cost, Scholarships], [University Campuses]

Living Cost, Dormitory and Scholarships

This page was written in 2018.

Living Cost Estimate

Here is a rough estimate of living cost for a graduate student. The foreign exchange rate of Japanese Yen (JPY) has remained in the range of about 1 USD = 80--120 JPY, 1 EUR = 100--140 JPY, 1 JPY = 8--12 KRW, and 1 CNY = 12--20 JPY for more than a decade.

Scholarships, if you get one, typically range in between 150k--200k JPY/month, as you can see in the page of Admission Process. Compared against this are:

Tuition: about 540k JPY/year (about 5k--6k USD/yr), equivalent of 45k JPY/mo. The University of Tokyo has a tuition exemption program; eligible students will be chosen based on academic performance and financial situation of their family. We do not know the fraction of students receiving this benefit in the University of Tokyo.
Food: about 35k--40k JPY/mo, if you are not a gourmet.
Housing and utility: See below for information on University Dormitory. In the private sector housing market, room rent for a single person apartment starts from 80k JPY/mo in the area around the Hongo campus (Nedu station, Todai-mae station), and 50k JPY/mo in Kashiwa area (Edogawa-dai station). See University Campuses, if you are not familiar what the two campuses are for. If you do not care whether your apartment is earthquake-proof or not, or if you do not mind longer time for daily commute, more inexpensive options may be available. Utility (electricity, gas, water, sewage) bills and a phone bill combined will be something like 15k--20k JPY/mo.
Tax: about 7k JPY/mo for a single-person household with income 200k JPY/mo, if physicists did not make mistakes in tax calculations.
Social Welfare premium:
- Public Health Insurance: required by law to joint the system. 70% of medical/dental treatment costs are covered by the insurance. Monthly premium is about 3k JPY/mo if you do not have "income," and is about 13k JPY/mo, if your "income" is about 200k JPY/mo; this estimate was calculated from information in this page.
- National Pension System: required by law ...... theoretically ...... to join the system. Monthly premium is about 16k JPY/mo independent of the income. If the taxable annual income in Japan of a graduate student does not exceed 1.2m JPY/year (about 100k JPY/mo), however, the student can waiver paying the monthly premium.
- It is hard for physicists to understand the precise definition of the "income" or "taxable income" in this context. Tax is not imposed on the government scholarship (so, it is not a taxable income), but the LGP fellowship and the JSPS fellowship are counted as taxable income. [What about GSS fellowship?? Sorry, we do not know the answer.]

Be aware that physicists preparing this web page cannot be good at estimating living costs.

In addition to the tuition every year, the University of Tokyo collects admission fee of about 280k JPY at the time you start the Ph.D. program.

University Dormitory

Dormitory options provided by the University of Tokyo:

Near Hongo campus: Toshima and Oiwake , room rent 10k--37k JPY/mo without including utility. Shirokane, room rent 33k--42k JPY/mo without including utility, stay within 1 year.

Near Kashiwa campus: Kashiwa-no-ha, room rent 60k--70k JPY/mo, utility included.

More information is available from the University of Tokyo Housing Office. It looks like there is not enough capacity in the University Dormitory to accommodate all the students who wish to take this option. [statistics??]

Scholarships

Major scholarship options are described in the page of Admission Process.

The Physics Major Course also provides an opportunity of a TA (teaching assistant) and an RA (research assistant) for students without those major scholarship options. Those opportunities are available for most of the graduate students of the Physics Major Course; duties associated with a TA or an RA are often designed so the duties do not consume much time of graduate students, but at the same time, the payment for a TA or an RA does not exceed 50k JPY/mo.

Tax rates in Japan remain low relatively to European countries. Public universities in Japan do not ask their alumni to make donations every year. So, we cannot expect the cost for higher education to be covered 100% for every student by tax payers' or alumni's money.

Here is fine print. The scholarship options described in the page of Admission Process, such as the JSPS fellowship, GSS fellowship, LGP fellowships and the GSGC, provide coverage only until the end of the 3rd academic year in the doctor course. When a graduate student does not finish a Ph.D. thesis by the end of the 3rd year of the doctor course (=the 5th year of the whole Ph.D. course), virtually there is no option for scholarships after that. That is another downside of a system where the source of scholarships is not linked to individual research groups but to more public sectors (such as departments and the government agency).
It sometimes happen in experimental groups that a big experimental program does not enter the stage of data taking and analysis within the 5th year of the graduate course. So, such research groups probably know how to deal with this problem.