This is a repost from five years ago. Things have changed quite a bit since then.
More depressing stats from one of my favorite websites of late, Heikin Nenshū Labo. This shows the trend in average salaries in Japan between the years 1995 and 2013.
In 1995, the average yearly salary for a "salaryman" in Japan was ¥4,570,000. The average salary peaked in 1997 at ¥4.67 million, but has fallen ever since. In 2009, the average salary was only ¥4.06 million, due to the recession that followed the "Lehman Brothers Shock" and stock market crash of 2008. Growth in salaries has been anemic in the years since.
Looking at this chart, I am curious to know, one, what the average salary was during the bubble years of the late 1980s, and, two, whether salaries have increased in 2014 and 2015. I would also like to know how "salaryman" is defined.
In 2013, the average male salaryman earned ¥5,110,000, compared to an average of only ¥2,720,000 for women.
This graph shows the average salary for men (blue) and women (red) according to age.
Doda has a pretty good breakdown of income according to age. The average fortynine-year-old man in Japan earns ¥6,830,000. 46% of those men earn more than seven million yen. Only 13% of men and 5% of women in their late forties earn more than a ten million yen a year.
At Career Connection, you can get information on the average salary paid by a particular company and read reviews by people who are working or have worked for the company. Nomura Securities, for example, pays workers in their forties an average of ¥16,240,000 a year. Not bad. TEPCO pays its forty-year-old employees an average of ¥12,170,000.