The ¥650,000 lesson

A personal story · Shinya Nagahama

At 18, I wanted a career in music. Before chasing that, I decided to build a financial foundation first — so I worked full-time as a pizza delivery rider in Japan. Hot summers, cold winters, rain, exhaustion, barely any absences, overtime whenever I could get it. I was earning roughly ¥150,000–180,000 a month, and from May to December I saved almost all of it.

18歳の頃、音楽を志す前にまず基盤を作ろうとピザ配達の仕事に打ち込みました。

By the end, I had about ¥650,000 saved. For an 18-year-old, that felt like climbing a mountain — every yen in that account represented real hours, real fatigue, real sacrifice.

I used it to buy my dream electronic drum kit, a Roland TD-30, at Utsunomiya PARCO — a shop that doesn't exist anymore, but anyone from Utsunomiya from that era probably remembers it. I practiced every single day. At the time, Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk" was everywhere, and Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud" was just starting to blow up — I played those two on repeat, over and over. It felt like proof that I'd earned something with my own hands — not a gift, not a loan, not family money.

The part I didn't expect

A lot of people assume electronic drums are basically silent. They're not — the bass drum vibration especially carries straight through the floor. I ended up building my own anti-vibration rig out of spare parts, including an old OBS board and pieces cut from a bicycle tire, just to cut down how much vibration reached the floor below. That took real dedication. But somewhere along the way, a different question started forming:

"Do I actually need this for the future I want — or do I just like it?"

Eventually I called a buyer. The TD-30 I bought for ¥650,000 sold for exactly ¥100,000. Yes — you read that right. ¥650,000 became ¥100,000. A friend I told about it didn't sugarcoat it: "Baka ka talaga" — roughly, "you really were an idiot there." Honestly? He was right. It didn't fully sting until years later, thinking about how many months of pizza deliveries that ¥550,000 gap actually represented.

There's an old story about a glass filling under a tap: most people drink as soon as they're thirsty, even before the glass is full. But if you want to actually build something, you wait for it to fill — and even then, you don't drink the fill itself, only what overflows. I was the kid who drank straight from an unfinished glass.

These days, before I buy something, I ask a different question than I used to — not "is this cool," but "does this have real value for where I'm heading." I still get it wrong sometimes. But the ¥550,000 gap between what I paid and what I got back wasn't really the cost. The lesson was.

「欲しい」と「必要」は違います。この気づきが一番の収穫でした。