[DaddyMulk]

First of all, I apologize for some of the vagueness/lack of solid information in this post; I'm posing this query based solely on the information I have available, and will update it once I have more.

A friend of mine (U.S. citizen) has been living in Japan for several years now, and lived there several times previously (roughly ~13 years altogether). Unfortunately, he lost his job as a translator for a law firm last November, and has been looking for work over there ever since. His visa is set to expire shortly, and he will be returning home in about a week.

During his time without a job, he has been asked to pay taxes (local? federal? Sorry, I'm not sure) to the tune of about 40,000 Yen per month. He was told that this was based on how much he would be liable for in taxes based on his previous income. He has apparently been making these payments for some time, though he did not mention it to myself, nor to his parents in the states, until recently. (sadly, my friend has a lot of pride and doesn't like asking others for help; otherwise, he'd likely ask about this himself, instead of his parents asking me to do so)

Now that it has come time for him to leave, he's recently let us know that he still owes about 80,000 Yen in taxes for the past couple of months. His parents are the ones who will have to lend him the money to pay for this, and they're skeptical about why someone should be paying this much in tax (or paying at all!) when they've been out of work for over a year. I spent 3 years in Japan myself, but never had any tax issues like this arise in that time.

So has anyone ever heard of/had experience with paying taxes in Japan while unemployed? I don't want to see my friend get into any sort of legal trouble for not paying, but I also don't want to see him throwing money away if this is some kind of mistake. As I said, I'll try to get more specifics out of him and will update this posting accordingly. Any information you could provide (and soon!) would be greatly appreciated.