Quote:
Originally Posted by Sangetsu
Never heard of this before. Your national income tax is deducted from your pay, and during your second year your local government will send you a bill for your residency tax, which you can pay monthly, or all at once. Most employers will pay the residency tax for you automatically if you ask them to.
Teaching English is not the most prestigious profession in Japan, but it pays the prevailing wage, and if you live outside the metro areas where the cost of living is lower, you can actually do quite well.
For those of us who quit teaching, and moved on to other things, we still have to pay taxes. And if we are lucky enough that our incomes are higher, so are the resulting taxes.
I have been here for 8 years or so now, and life is good. I have my own business, and now make more money than when I first arrived. Most of my friends are English speakers, which is natural enough, but I have no regrets about coming here.
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That residency tax--that's it. I thought of it as a municipal tax and there was a fellow USN I knew living in Tokyo. I assume he got the bills and ignored them for years so the charges piled up and then the raid happened.
I never got hit like that because I wasn't there long enough and fortunately I lived across the Tamagawa in Yokohama.