[OC] Wie erschwinglich sind Japans Großstädte? Wohn- und Nahrungsmittelbelastung

Followed by the North America map, this is Part 2 of my Urban Stress Index (USI) series.

The Urban Stress Index measures how much of a single full-time worker’s gross monthly salary is required to cover:

• Rent (1-bedroom equivalent in the city centre)• Basic food costs
For Japan, I focused on the 20 designated cities (政令指定都市).

Methodology (Japan):
Housing: Average rent of a 1DK unit in the ward where the city’s main JR station is located, extracted from SUUMO (In Japan, 1DK is the standard self-contained option for a single worker.)
Income: Prefecture-level wages for general full-time workers (monthly cash earnings, bonus excluded). Source: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (latest available data: 2024)
Food: A proxy based on a low-cost Japanese set meal (Ootoya baseline)

Key observations:
Housing + food burden is relatively uniform (compressed) across Japanese cities;
Greater Tokyo metro cities are slightly higher

This index measures structural baseline pressure for a single full-time worker, so it does not account for taxes, family households, etc.

Note: The 23 Special Wards of Tokyo are NOT designated cities, they are not included in this map