I’m a college student. Do you think other students my age would be put off if they found out I had nearly ¥6 million in savings? I have an older college student I’m seeing casually, and he asked how much I had saved. I asked him first, “How much would make you think someone had a lot saved?” and he said, “Probably around ¥200,000.” Then he asked, “How much do you have?” and said he had ¥100,000. Come to think of it, when I’ve talked about savings with other friends at university or my ex-boyfriend, who was the same age as me, they had at most ¥100,000–¥200,000, or nothing at all.

This year alone, my total spending—including rent and fixed expenses—has come to ¥5 million. I live on my own, and I think I spend quite a lot for an ordinary college student because I buy designer goods and get cosmetic procedures. Even so, I’m able to save money, and I’ve saved ¥3 million over the past year. Including what I had already saved while living with my family, I have ¥6 million in total. The guy I’m seeing casually has watched me spend quite a bit of money, so I think he was curious and asked because it seemed strange to him. I couldn’t exactly tell a guy with ¥100,000 in savings that I had around ¥6 million, so I just vaguely said, “I have more than that…” If an ordinary college student heard that someone had ¥6 million in savings, they’d definitely think, “There’s no way they earned that without doing something they can’t tell people about, like working in the sex industry,” so it’s better not to casually reveal how much I have saved, right? All my friends who do papa-katsu (compensated dating in Japan) have received several million yen in total from papa-katsu alone this year, so my sense of what’s normal is probably off. But it’s pretty common for ordinary college students to have less than ¥1 million in savings, isn’t it…?