Quote:Well, not only does her mother apparently collect diamonds as a hobby, but the condo mother and daughter Mizuno live in is what’s referred to as a okushon (億ション), a wordplay on mansion (マンション; manshon), from the Japanese word for a condominium.

You see, the Japanese word for 10,000 is man (万) which is a homophone for the first half of the aforementioned mansion. The next highest number counter in Japanese is oku (億), which means 100,000,000. So basically it’s a wordplay to suggest that it’s a super-ritzy condominium nearly no one could afford.

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Quote:And Makoto has her own place with no visible income or visible family at all.

Quote:but I suspect Bob would prefer a coherent explanation of the finances in case they come up in the story.

patio11 Wrote:The company is your public life. Have an issue with your landlord? The company will handle it, in those cases where the company is not your landlord. (“So let me get this straight: we’re going to pay our employees, and then they’re going to immediately hand 25% of their salary over to an apartment? Doesn’t this suggest an obvious inefficiency? We could just buy a building and house dozens of employees there — lower transaction costs plus economies of scale.” Many Japanese companies have done this math already, and company dorms are quite common, particularly for young, single employees.)

patio11 Wrote:I heard a great line about this once, and unfortunately I cannot remember the source: “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.” The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.

$30k is a reasonable wage for an engineer in Japan virtually anywhere but Tokyo. In Tokyo, average mid-career wages in engineering are roughly $50k (5 million yen a year). (Pay is generally higher in the financial industry and in foreign-owned corporations, which are generally in the financial industry.)

(03-22-2019, 08:05 PM)classicdrogn Wrote: How about Dr. Tomoe? He originally punched into Pharoh 90's space with some kind of high-energy physics experiment, wasn't it? That's not the kind of thing typically done by one dude in his basement, or in residential areas in general...

(01-08-2020, 12:58 PM)Shepherd Wrote: Minako's parents seem to be a salaryman and housewife in the manga, but the anime had her living in London, so her family can afford international relocation. Was her being an idol singer canon or fanon? Either way, she seems to be at least upper middle class.

(01-08-2020, 12:58 PM)Shepherd Wrote: I think the lesson to be learned here is that Usagi's mother added a little something extra into the reincarnation spell so that everyone would be well off in their new lives.

(01-08-2020, 12:58 PM)Shepherd Wrote: It looks like everyone has been covered except for Neptune, Uranus, Venus, and Tuxedo Mask.

Neptune is a violinist and noted to be very fashionable. Uranus is a race car driver who seems to own a car and motorcycle in Tokyo, if the pics on the Sailor Moon wiki site aren't misleading. They definitely appear to be rich.

Minako's parents seem to be a salaryman and housewife in the manga, but the anime had her living in London, so her family can afford international relocation. Was her being an idol singer canon or fanon? Either way, she seems to be at least upper middle class.

Tuxedo Mask could afford to go to Harvard in America. Definitely well to do.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that Usagi's mother added a little something extra into the reincarnation spell so that everyone would be well off in their new lives.

Quote:Minako being an idol is canon in the Sailor Moon live action series, where she's dying of cancer IIRC.

(03-22-2019, 12:29 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote:

Quote:And Makoto has her own place with no visible income or visible family at all.

Based on some of the research I've done, I'm working on the assumption that she has a lot of money from compensation payments for the deaths of her parents, as well as payouts from whatever insurance they had.  Given the historical context, the plane crash in which they died was almost certainly Japan Airlines Flight 123 or an analogue thereof.  According to multiple sources I've checked (and don't take every detail in that Wikipedia article as gospel, because it's subject to edit-warring that keeps shifting the blame and changing the story), Boeing made compensatory payments to the families of the victims that have been described as "healthy" and "generous", and JAL itself paid "condolence money" without admitting liability; there were also lawsuits filed in the United States, the results of which I have yet to actually discover. 

Given all that, and what her apartment looks like (large, comfortable), I'm pretty confident that she's quite well off.

She almost certainly has an absentee guardian; her lifestyle is unusual but not impossible under Japanese law.

(03-22-2019, 07:23 PM)hazard Wrote: If the Tsukino house is indeed company owned that offers interesting implications about just how good a journalist Mr Tsukino is. Or how badly they need him close by central Tokyo.