Working Holiday (Accommodation, finances)

Hi,
I'm planning on staying for a Working Holiday next year. And just to have a rough idea of what to bring I was looking around a bit.
The official page tells me to bring about 200000Y to start and survive the first time. So calculating around a bit, for one month you should have
1500Y/day, so 45000 only for food.
Looking further there are rarely apartments for below 60000Y/month. (even though I'm already totally okay with 1K. As long as I have a place to sleep, shower and go to the toilet. Maybe I would not even need a kitchen if that made the room cheaper, since eating out like.. Ramen or so, is not that expensive anyway)
and knowing that there are also other things to pay, I get a final amount of 150000. But like this, the 200000Y mentioned would last for maximal a bit more than a month. Of course, for working holidays, I would work a lot, too. But comparing the income rates to what I have to spend...
If I get something around 800/h, (I'm 18 without much work experience and no native speaker of english. Though I know Japanese at least as well as I do English), work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I would get 32000Y, taking away 20% tax: 25600. So, that would not even cover my food costs. I wonder how this should be possible at all... Anyone with experience here?

And onto another question: All my calculations above are based on what I found on the Internet, though I have to say, that most of those information are from pages about Tokyo. Actually I don't want to be in Tokyo for the Working Holidays. I still want to be in a bigger city, not in some small town, but I can imagine that smaller cities can be much less expensive. Which would make the whole thing more affordable. I actually don't prefer any city MUCH, but if I could choose I'd want it to be in the Kansai area. My problem is now, that there are rarely pages - for guesthouses or gaijin houses, since those seem to be the most affordable ones... and the ones you have least problems to get - where you can look for accommodation all over Japan (not only Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto or so...). Does anyone know a Japan-wide page to look for places like that? Or at least something similar?

Thanks in advance.

Regarding food expenses:
1,500 yen/day is for someone traveling/visiting for a short-term stay.
If you have a room with a kitchen area and a refrigerator, groceries can be as low as 10,000 /month depending on your eating habits. 15,000/month is a fair number if you are cooking all your meals (pack a lunch).

In any major city (Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, etc) the rents surprising do not change very much compared to the Tokyo area.
You can find a large apartment in Funabashi for 60,000/month and you are 1 hour from Shinjuku, for example.
In all the major areas, land is scarce so the difference is not as significant as you might think.
Choose the city you want to experience most overall.

What I don't know is what types of jobs are available to an 18 y.o. with intermediate English and Japanese. You should seriously research this before anything else.

I don't know any any nationwide net for guest houses. But outside Tokyo and Osaka, I doubt there are many cities with enough guest houses to warrant such a site anyway.

Starting off as far as work its going to be very hard to find work at 18. I did my working holiday when i was 18 i was down to my last $100.00 (it took me 3 or 4 months to find a job mainly because of my age) when i got lucky and found a kitchen hand job in a ryokan. English teaching for a school or English school wont happen you need to be about 20 and native or near native English. Also you will need to be very good a Japanese to be hired at even a fast food place.

As far as a place to stay i suggest looking up a guest house. The reason being you need an income to get an apartment and also key money etc which is expensive.

GOOD LUCK :-)

Both of you, thank you for your information.

After reading your comment, kyototrans, I tried googling in Japanese for apartments for foreign people, and I have to say I found apartments down to 25.000Y(Though I think they are unfurnished...) in the surroundings of Sendai and similar. I don't know why I did not try that before. Those facts relieve me, making it not as impossible as before. And after some googling I was also able to find pages for jobs, also to be done by foreigners.


Wow, how much money did you take to JP, if you could stay 3-4 months, without having any job?
Don't worry I did not think about teaching English.
But without wanting to sound too fond of myself, I think I can say about myself that I speak Japanese pretty well. (having passed JLPT1 more than 1 year ago, but I don't think the JLPT is a good way to measure ones knowlegde. Only for a rough idea.)