Originally Posted by
joejones
The other thing is that Japanese employers almost always pay for a commuter pass on top of the employee's salary, no matter how far away home happens to be.
And sometimes they can live pretty far away. I had one colleague who commuted from Okinawa to Tokyo on a regular basis (not everyday, but several times a week, depending on how "compactly" he could arrange his work schedule). Though he was (correctly) not fully reimbursed for his travel expenses (after all it was his voluntary choice to live there), he nevertheless did receive some monies.