Tax, Alcohol and Radiation?

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 14:13:10 +0000

It’s a new year, so in a fit of preparation, I decided to go and make sure my tax links were all correct before next month when I sit down, watch Black Books Series 1, Episode 1, then figure out how much money I owe the Japanese government.

My first stop for this is always The National Tax Agency website. The English page may look a little 1998-esque, but importantly:

There is an English page;
It provides a link to the English language summary guide for filling in your tax forms ( 2013 .pdf here, if you’re interested).

I might write this up next month when I do the taxes, but I have to say that doing your own taxes isn’t so bad. It’s easier than some other things here for sure, and the people involved are actually usually very helpful.

Back to my original point. I was looking around the page and much of it is quite dry, with very dull sounding links like, " Commissioner’s Directive on the Mutual Agreement Procedures (Administrative Guidelines)", and " Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States issue internal guidance to improve the Mutual Agreement Procedure and Bilateral Advance Pricing Arrangement processes". Thrilling stuff.

Then, you find links like, “The results of Sake Awards”. I have no idea where that fits on any governments tax pages, but there is a very decent page outlining the winners out of various sake (rice wine) breweries in their pursuit of excellence.

However, the winner of the “Links I Don’t Expect to Find on a Government Tax Page” award goes to:

The results of radiation examination of alcoholic beverages (Last updated on January. 9)

For the purpose of providing consumers with safe and good quality alcoholic beverages, the NTA conducts radioactive examination for alcoholic beverages including those for exports.

So basically, the tax men and women of Japan have managed to get a gig where they have to spend lots of time with alcohol in order to … er … test for radiation safety. And to ensure good quality! The health and foods ministries must be upset they missed out on that job, especially since they seem to have issued the testing guidelines.

Yes, this post is very tongue in cheek.

Municipal Tax

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 02:58:40 +0000

It’s back to the tax treadmill again.

June 30th marked the requirement date for the first instalment of this financial year’s local municipal tax ( juuminzei). This is only paid manually by self employed people etc., or people like me who get paid in bizarre ways off-shore, as everyone else gets theirs taken out of salary. So I went down to the post office to hand over my cash.

Next month is the first pre-payment for my 2005 income tax and then in August it’s my next juuminzei payment. Ho hum. Still, taxes here are less than in many other countries, so I can’t grumble; I suppose if I paid directly every month like I did in the UK, it’s less surprising that having to pay a lot more every quarter (though the juuminzei is actually set every June, August, November and January for a given tax year).

The amount you pay is apparently a cross of where you live (which ward of Tokyo (ku)), and how much income tax you paid. You also pay for a year where you lived on January 1st of that year. Just thought I’d pass that on, in case there are some tax fetishists out there.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

neal — 2004-07-06

doh! had my tax self assessment come thru today! boo hoo!

Tax on Nanikore

Tax, Alcohol and Radiation?

Municipal Tax

Original Comments