A recent poll by Mainichi indicates that the support rate for Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s Cabinet is at 18 percent, which down six points from a previous poll conducted in April.

As many as 77 percent of respondents said they disagree with the April launch of a new medical insurance system for over-75s, while 74 percent disapproved of the reinstated provisional tax on gasoline, the result of the ruling coalition ramming a bill amending the Special Taxation Measures Law through the Diet into law.

The Fukuda Cabinet enjoyed a support rate of 57 percent when it came to power last fall.

Party-wise, the trends are the same.

As for the support rate for political parties, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) gained 20 percent, four points down from the previous poll, while the approval rate for the largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) increased by six points to 28 percent. It is the first time that the support rate for the DPJ surpassed that the LDP’s since December last year, when the ratio stood at 27 percent for the DPJ versus 26 percent for the LDP.

Stories about misbehaving public officials are commonplace - they differ only in the details. But the details usually make interesting reading.

A Wakayama prefecture civil servant has made worldwide headlines with a feat of astonishing dedication.

Tax-payers in Kinokawa wish he could show similar dedication to his job. For it has been revealed in a 9-month period, the horny civil servant clocked up more than three quarters of a million hits on pornographic websites from his work computer.

His superiors were alerted to the problem only when his computer became infected with a virus.

The 57-year-old man, who has not been named, works for the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan.

That works out at almost 10,000 pages a day, or more than 20 each minute he was at his desk.

The BBC reports that his habit “reached its peak” last July with more than 177,000 page hits times during office hours.

The man has not been fired.

One thing that Japanese politicians are always hoping to avoid, but are always causing, is ‘confusion’. And with Golden Week and the end of April approaching, Japanese motorists are getting reading for some ‘major confusion’.

Except of course, there is no confusion in the literal sense. It’s an absolute certainty that petrol prices are going to go up. And by more than a little.

The government are working to reinstate the so-called temporary petrol tax that ‘ran out’ at the end of March, leading to a drop in pump prices of ¥20-25. If they succeed, it’s likely to be slapped back on at the beginning of May. The beginning of May also coincides with Golden Week, when Japan goes on holiday en masse, and traditionally gets shafted by a pre-Golden Week price hike at petrol stations anyway.

When the ¥25 tax was removed at the beginning of April, prices round here fell, at the very most, by ¥20, and consumers waited for 3-5 days to see the benefit, as retailers waited to ‘finish stocks of petrol bought at the higher, taxed price’. Even so, there were grumbles from petrol retailers about projected losses.

With the start of Golden Week, the Japanese consumer can expect to get a three-way shafting - the now traditional ¥4-5 Golden Week hike, the continuing rise of global crude prices, and the reinstatement of the tax. And when the tax comes back, will it be (as cynics like me suspect) at a full ¥25 even at stations that only reduced prices by ¥20 or less? There’s potential for the added confusion of when retailers choose to readjust the tax/price - selling petrol that they bought at the lower price, will they maintain the lower price while they still have stock (just as they maintained the higher prices until they’d sold all their higher priced stock a month ago), or will that tax go back on the second it can?

Assorted media are mentioning prices of ¥160 or higher. For comparison, my nearest petrol station is currently selling at ¥122, so we’re talking about a rise of over 30%.

Will all this be enough to enrage the traditionally docile Japanese consumer? The pre-Golden Week price hike is the most interesting part of the equation. Just as everyone prepares get in their cars and go off on holiday, the petrol prices are raised. Every year, like clockwork, the captive audience gets shafted. And does little more than quietly grumble, and acquiesce and pay up. After all, what’s the alternative - vote for change, or something equally mad?

Many have used it. Some have got away with it. I remember kids at school busting out the “My grandmother died” excuse to explain absences. It never occurred to me they might be lying until it emerged that one lad experienced the loss of three grandmothers in quick succession.

An Osaka tax inspector has resigned after apparently claiming compassionate leave for deaths in his family on 11 occasions, the Mainichi reports.

Each time, he stayed home in order to cure his backache. “It was too much hassle to get a medical certificate for sick leave,” he was quoted as telling his bosses.

His bosses discovered the scam when he told them in September last year that his grandmother’s funeral was being held at a funeral hall, which was found not to exist.

On investigation, his bosses discovered 10 more false claims between 2004 and 2007, in addition to which, “the man also went home on 11 other occasions in 2006 and 2007 by faking business trips.”

Well, there goes the dollar. One greenback will now officially not even buy you 100 yen. Some say that this will mean more exports from America to Japan, or perhaps more manufacturing of goods in America. Others think it just signals a long and deep recession. I’d like to hear Mr. Pink’s opinion.

Peter wrote earlier today how Japan is a very cash-based society. Underlining that point, a story has been reported which is not unusual in itself except in its sheer magnitude.

Hearing that someone in Japan has a fortune in cash stashed somewhere about their house is relatively common. There are various reasons for this, one of which is the poor return on savings with banks with interest rates close to zero.

But two sisters from Osaka were hiding their wealth from the taxman, it’s reported. They are suspected of “hiding about 5.93 billion yen inherited from their father, who founded a group of eight firms including real estate leasing and loan companies.”

That comes out to about US$57,000,000. In cash. In their house.

After investigators found “more than 5 billion yen in cash [which] was found in cardboard boxes in a garage”, one of the sisters fessed up, the other said she had “forgotten about [the] cash kept in her home.”

They are charged with “evading about 2.86 billion yen [US$28 million] in inheritance tax, the highest figure for a case involving inheritance tax evasion recorded in Japan”.

according to an article released in february 21st by the economist, the magazine revisted an issue they first discussed in print a decade ago, namely “ japan’s amazing ability to disappoint.”

while the steady economic growth of the past few years has been an encouraging sign, there are major structural problems in the economy which threaten to relegate the japanese market to a decadent future where it would no longer be a “top-tier” economy, according to the economy minister, Hiroko Ota.

With the government looking determined to push through a tax reform bill that JP reported on last week, it might come as something of a surprise to hear that it’s being reported tonight that they have agreed to drop the bill, or at least the clause concerning “road-designated tax revenues”, which has been facing stiff opposition and causing the oft-stated ‘confusion’ in parliament.

That Mainichi article linked above might lead you to believe that consumers in Japan can now look forward to cheaper gasoline at the pump. But I for one won’t be holding my breath.

Kyodo reports rather fuller details, including -

The withdrawal comes after the ruling and opposition camps accepted [House of Representatives Speaker Yohei] Kono’s offer made earlier in the day to resolve the tense confrontation over the bill in the lower house, a senior opposition lawmaker said. The offer calls for withdrawing the stopgap bill and seeking “some kind of conclusion within this fiscal year” through March on a separate bill to maintain the special taxes for 10 years beyond their expiration on March 31.

There’s no suggestion of nixing the gas tax, or lowering the rate. All this does is free up parliamentary time, by postponing a spat that sounds like it was beginning to get out of hand -

Prior to the deliberations at the financial committee, about 50 DPJ members blocked the passage near the committee room, holding up signs which read ”Road interests versus people’s lives.” In the committee meeting, opposition lawmakers protested against holding a vote, seizing the committee head’s microphone and slamming desks.

There’s clearly other pressing business the government wants to get round to (keep your eyes open) and could do without such strident hindrance. But it can only be seen as a postponement - the government will resubmit the issue in a bill in some other form in the near future, and in the face of further opposition, are likely to force it through.

Not that long ago Japan’s environment ministry was mulling a 2,400-yen tax on each ton of carbon emitted by households using kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas, which are the main heating and cooking fuels in Japan. Even the head of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives (Keizai Doyukai) got into the act, saying that Japan needs “higher rates of the carbon tax to be imposed on goods and services.”

Now we hear that Japanese government has reportedly set aside 215 billion yen as an emergency relief package to aid people and small businesses affected by soaring crude oil prices.

The package includes eased lending terms for small enterprises, subsidies for ship, bus and airline operators that serve rural areas, and further discounts in nighttime expressway tolls.

On top of this, Tokyo plans to hand out more money to local governments in colder areas of the nation so they can aid low-income people in their areas.

No one among us is unaffected by the rise in oil prices, so it is a mystery why the government is singling out only specific individuals and businesses for special treatment. You would think that if the government really wanted to help people, they would simply cut the taxes that currently double the consumer price of gasoline and kerosene at the pump.

The opposition DPJ has finally told the government what everyone else has been thinking for some time, namely, “Stop wasting time and public money going on about bloody UFOs and do some bloody work”. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba piped up last week saying he was “troubled over potential legal issues if one arrives and it requires action by the Self-Defense Forces”.

The following day, chief government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura entered the grand UFO conversation, adding “Personally, I absolutely believe they exist.”

Then the Education and science Minister Kisaburo Tokai said he ‘hoped aliens existed so children would become more interested in space’ - “It would be fun if they existed,” he told reporters.

And with the whole question taking up more column inches than it needs to, the opposition DPJ’s Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama (brother of Minister of Justice Kunio Hatoyama), ‘told reporters on Friday that Cabinet members and lawmakers should not get too involved in the UFO discussions, dismissing aliens as an impossibility.’

“Since it’s all complete fantasy, it makes no sense to discuss how the Defense Ministry should respond,” the Yomiuri Shimbun quoted him as saying.

How has it even come up for debate? Any cinema-goer knows that if aliens come, they’ll land in the U.S., and the U.S. will deal with them. Or they’ll land all over the world. And the U.S. will deal with them.

The word on the tax front is that the Fukuda cabinet is floating the idea of raising the Japanese consumption tax from the current 5% to somewhere in the range of 11% to 17 %.

To keep Japan’s medical and elderly care at current levels, a consumption tax raise up to 11-17%, up from the current 5% may become necessary, the Cabinet announced Wednesday at a Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy briefing, the Asahi Shimbun reports.

The Council predicted the price tag on upholding medical and elderly care will have come to some 14-31 trillion yen in necessary tax increases by the fiscal year of 2025. Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura and Kaoru Yosano, chairman of the LDP’s taxation commitee has also expressed support of a tax raise in order to sustain the Japanese welfare system.

“We cannot allow ourselves to cut down on social security, even if we are unable to keep up with the economical situation,” Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said at the briefing. “It has been decided sine June, by the Abe Cabinet, that we would look into a possible tax raise.“

“I don’t think there is anybody who thought we would be able to keep the consumption tax at 5%, in the long run,” LDP Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura commented at the same press conference.

The consumption tax was introduced in 1988 at a level of 3%. Opponents feared that once implemented, the temptation would always be there to continue raise the rate, no matter what it became. . . Politicians promised that they would never, ever raise it above 3%. . . And the world goes round and round. . .

Japan’s Economy, Trade and Industry Minister has said he is planning to demand an 80-billion-yen slice of the 2008 budget to be earmarked to finance projects aimed at preventing global warming.

Once of the projects the nation is considering calls for developing technology to make it possible to store carbon dioxide under the ocean floor.

Most industrialized countries are struggling with the aging of their societies, and with its very low birth rate, Japan generally leads the pack.

There are two systems that provide health insurance and retirement income in Japan, the Social Insurance System (available to any employee of a medium-sized or larger company, and their families) and the National Insurance System (available to everyone else, including self-employed). Both systems work fairly well, covering 70% of medical costs and providing a basis for Japanese retirees to live.

Oddly, although everyone is ostensibly required to pay into the local version of Social Security, there are no penalties for not doing so, and many Japanese don’t bother with the system at all. This includes some politicians, which caused a scandal that ended several careers a few years ago.

Currently Japan’s Social Security system is in hot water after losing data on up to 50 million citizens who paid into the system over the past twenty years, including that of yours truly — we recently asked for a report on the payments I’d made when I was teaching ESL and were told they didn’t have me in their computer. It turns out that a change in the number used to track these payments caused information on millions to disappear, causing extra retirement headaches for many.

Not to be done by other social networks and online worlds, MSNBC and Associated Press are reporting that Sony will launch its own virtual universe for its Playstation 3 console.

“Home” is a real-time, networked world for the PlayStation 3 in which players create human-looking characters called avatars. They can buy clothing, furniture and videos to play on a virtual flat-screen television in their virtual apartments.

The concept is strikingly similar to Linden Lab’s “Second Life,” a Web-based phenomenon with nearly 4.5 million residents. But Sony’s world will feature heavy doses of video games for avatars to play, as well as virtual arcades, music, movies and other Sony-approved media downloads.

More on the article can be read here.

The Japanese government’s policy of increasing spending and hiking taxes whenever there is the slightest indication of improving economic numbers is so regular and predicable, would be boring were it not so pathetic.

This week Japan’s Finance Ministry submitted its 2007 budget to the government, reporting that tax revenues have increased by 16.5 percent due to the current economic recovery. They follow this with a plan to increase government spending for the first time in two years and to cut the issuance of government bonds.

Faced with all of this good economic news, Finance Minister Koji Omi could not resist the urge to do what seems to come so naturally to people in his position.

Omi indicated that to accelerate fiscal rehabilitation, discussion must start by late next year on revenue reforms, including a consumption tax hike. The ruling bloc has shelved talk of a sales tax rise until after next summer’s Upper House election to avoid a voter backlash.

You know, there are times when I can just imagine some Nagatacho high muckamuck exhorting hordes of navy blue clad bureaucrats onward with words like, “We’ve nipped recoveries in the bud before, boys, and by God we can do it again!”

As we reported on Japan Talk #045, a government worker in Nara received full wages during a five-year period during which he worked a mere 8 days: one day in 2001, six days in 2003, and one day in 2005.

According to city officials, there was nothing they could do about it, because the man broke no laws or regulations!! According to in-house regulations, a Nara Municipal Government worker is entitled to up to 90 days of paid sick leave for a single illness. The man kept taking sick leave, submitting certificates from a doctor, always for a different ailment.

Now it has been learned that the employee in question and others from the Nara Municipal Government pressured the doctor into issuing false certificates.

According to the doctor, the former employee began coming to the clinic about two years ago.

He complained of a backache or diarrhea he claimed was work-related and had the doctor write about 20 certificates to submit to his workplace.

Another employee visited the clinic and demanded the doctor write a certificate concerning a disease the employee used to have. When the doctor refused, a man identifying himself as the employee’s boss visited the doctor and said the two would be in trouble if they did not have the certificate. The man also asked the doctor to extend the employee’s treatment period.

Meanwhile, the government is still claiming that taxes will need to be raised in order to cover shortfalls.

Yokohama Customs officials have cracked down on the U.S. Naval Air Facility Atsugi and their practice of opening a pizza restaurant up to the Japanese public every other Saturday.

The goodwill gesture got into trouble and the restaurant was forced to close to outsiders when people started taking pizzas, which are not subject to Japanese sales tax, off base.

The officials say that once the pizza has been removed from the U.S. base, it is subject to Japanese taxes. Since the taxes were not paid, the move violates the Status of Forces Agreement, which spells out how the U.S. military can operate in Japan.

Yokohama Customs initially turned a blind eye to practice, but it finally had to do something when it started getting out of hand. Last month, about 1,000 Japanese people showed up at the restaurant to take advantage of its relatively cheap fare.

Base officials currently are trying to come up with a fix for the problem, so Japanese visitors can have their pizza and eat it too. (Sorry! )

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.

The Nikkei stock index hit the 15,000 mark for the first time in five years yesterday, another sign that the Japanese economy is finally on the mend.

With all the good economic news coming out of Japan, there is no doubt in my mind that rising taxes will be just around the corner.

The Liberal Democratic Party’s second in command indicated that the LDP will raise the nation’s consumption tax during fiscal 2007 in order to finance social security programs.

Asked by a moderator on a Fuji TV program whether the LDP’s election manifesto means the consumption tax — currently at 5 percent — will be hiked in the year starting in April 2007, LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe said, “Yes.”

The LDP now has to consider the margin of increase, the party’s No. 2 man said.

Apparently, the thought of cutting costs has not occurred to the ruling party. Perhaps they need to maintain budget levels so they can ensure a steady supply of luxury ashtrays. . .