Your information is slightly out of date. In the last year or two, the cost of living has rapidly increased, but wages have not gone up proportionally. So all the things are cheaper than much of North America and europe, in fact right now the situation is getting worse for the average Japanese person.

Which was terrible for Japan’s economy. But they’ve come a long way the past couple of years and their inflation has been in a much healthier range lately. There was a good decade where it was often negative, which is pretty bad.