Japan’s Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki has voiced his resistance to calls for reduced consumption tax rates on food and other daily necessities when the government raises the tax rate from the current 5 percent.
“Reduced rates are not necessarily needed,” said Tanigaki, who proposed doubling the consumption tax rate to 10 percent by the mid-2010s as one of his policy pledges when he announced his bid Thursday to succeed Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is stepping down in September.
Japan is different from Europe, where in some countries sales taxes top 20 percent and reduced rates are applied to some items, he told reporters.
Is anyone else getting tired of Japanese politicians constantly trying to rationalize tax policies by pointing to other countries? Some countries in Europe take a full month off in the summertime, but I don’t see anything like that happening soon in Japan.
Tanigaki reiterated that the government should use consumption tax revenues specifically for social security purposes when the tax is raised.
This also is an obvious ploy designed to make a doubling of the tax more palatable to the rubes. If I remember correctly, the government was able to get the people to accept implementation of the consumption tax in the first place by promising it would never go over the original 3 percent. I’d be willing to bet that once the rate gets to the level the government wants, all this talk about using “consumption tax revenues specifically for social security purposes” will go right out the same window.
And you know what? I’ll also bet that the people of Japan will just suck it up and pay.
Note: In the interest of providing original material, I always run a search on the internet to see if anyone else has posted what I’m about to. When I ran a search for “Grib my hand”, a confused search engine suggested this:
* Cream of the Crop
* Vote for the Plastic Soul Band
* Kim Dae Jung and Japanese Emperor in 2002 World Cup
* North Korea propaganda videos
* Japundit listeners surging
* Brain dead in U.S. recover in Japan
* Japan to run biodiesel car in Dakar Rally
* Japan live expectancy falls
* Students and teachers want free college
* Beekeepers wary of government alien species list
* Otaku take issue with cops over Akihabara
* Miniature pigs big in Japan
* Fish recruited to fight terror
* Osaka storing vintage wines
* Railroads to issue maternity badges
* Be the curry
* Go pluck yourself!
Japundit Contributors:
Danny Bloom in Taiwan, David Weber in Tokyo, Marie Mockett in New York, Sylvain Bouchard in Sendai, Mike Plugh in Akita, Harvey, in Osaka, ghoti in Fukuoka, Chef Jo in Tottori, Mr. Wake in Kamakura, Tokyoid in London, Bill (Ampontan) Sakovich in Saga, JP in Tokyo
The characters on the bag read Denki Anma Fukkatsu (Electric Massage Revival).
Denki Anma (electric massage) is a term used to describe what is going on in the illustration — Person A holds Person B’s legs up in the air by the ankles as he steps on Person B’s crotch and moves his foot around very quickly like an electric massager.
What this has to do with Doritos is anybody’s guess.
Sponsored by Toyota, the car will the first vehicle totally powered by biodiesel fuel to enter the rally.
[T]he team will need about 10,000 liters (2,600 gallons) of tempura oil, which will be donated by students, the school cafeteria, as well as neighborhood restaurants.
The main drawback of using tempura oil is smell. One researcher said that testing the fuel in the lab gave him heartburn and put him off of tempura for days.
Last week on Penn Jillete’s podcast (listen here) Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, said that if he were not making cartoons, he would have come to Japan to teach English. Message to all English teachers in Japan: you blew it big time. You all could have been zillionaire cartoonists.
I lean back in my chair, stroke my chin, and wonder…just what would the lovable characters of South Park say if they were English Teachers….
East Japan Railway Company (JR East) and 15 private railway companies in Kanto have decided to start issuing “maternity mark” badges that identify a woman as being pregnant. This his being done in hopes that more people will be willing to give up their seats to women who are pregnant. The scheme was implemented after “a stream of requests from passengers” (mostly pregnant women, no doubt).
“When you’re in the early stages of pregnancy, it’s hard (for people) to tell just from your appearance, and you can’t get the passengers around you to notice,” one passenger said. Another passenger commented, “Even if you think someone is pregnant, you can’t give up your seat because you’re afraid of being wrong.”
I wonder why this is necessary, since all Japanese trains have special sections of seats set aside for the infirm and aged.
There’s feng shui (literally, wind - water) for just about everything these days, from traditional office locations, feng shui for the home, feng shui for whatever the geomancers say. There are hundreds of books on the subject now, some in Chinese, some in Japanese, some in English. It is not pronounced fang shooey.
In India, some websites are using vaastu shastra to bring balance and harmony between nature’s five elements — earth, fire, water, air and space — to bring in more traffic for their customers’ websites. There’s even a new book from India titled Web Vaastu by Dr Smita Narang that explains how vaastu can increase traffic to your site by 60 percent or more.
Now, a team of feng shui experts in Hong Kong have come up with a book titled “Web Feng Shui” and it’s theme is that with the right placement of your desk, chair, computer and other objects in the room you use for your computing work, you can increase traffic to you own personal website by up to 80 percent, if you follow the correct feng shui procedures. In other words, a perfectly harmonzied website, thanks to the supernatural powers of feng shui.
Are you one of those people who just can’t seem to get the right rhythm when double-clicking your mouse, or a person (like me) who gets antsy watching someone who is hopelessly double-click impaired (like Mrs. JP)?
Well, Buffalo may have the answer to your mousy prayers in a pair of new PC mouse models (BOMC-C2 and BOMU-RC2) with an extra button that double-clicks automatically when you press it (once).
I don’t know about you, but normally when I hear the term “sexual harassment” I think of a guy hitting on a subordinate or coworker, someone telling dirty jokes, and things like that. As bad as some of these things may be, they are not even close to some of the weirdness that seems to be going on in the Japanese workplace.
Just recently, the Tokyo District Court has ordered a man who works for the government’s Health Ministry to play 550,000 to a woman coworker because he forced here to pluck his beard. . .!?!
The woman, who is in her 30s and is from Kanagawa Prefecture, refused, saying that he should do it himself, but the man forced her to pluck his beard, the ruling said.
So after she told him to go pluck himself, he forced her?
How in the heck do you force someone to pluck your beard?
The woman had been seeking 5 million yen in damages.
Check out this video from 2002 World Cup, which was hosted jointly by Japan and Korea.
Note how president Kim Dae Jung and his wife enter the box first, and then effectively block Japanese Emperor Akihito and Princess Michiko, all the time totally ignoring the efforts of the Japanese Imperial Couple to get past them to their seats at the far end of the box.
Had the roles been reversed, I’ll bet there would have been people in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul within minutes, cutting off their fingers and chewing on the Japanese flag.
Trouble is, he wasn’t referring to the missile brandishing NORKs, but rather to Japan!
The Blue House chief of staff, Lee Byung-wan, slammed Japan yesterday, calling its reaction to North Korea’s missile launches “truly evil.” He labeled Tokyo’s talk of a pre-emptive attack on the North’s missile facilities as a sign of “militarism and expansionism.”
Japan’s Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki has voiced his resistance to calls for reduced consumption tax rates on food and other daily necessities when the government raises the tax rate from the current 5 percent. 
Last week on Penn Jillete’s 
East Japan Railway Company (JR East) and 15 private railway companies in Kanto have decided to start issuing 
