The joy of tax
And I thought I had left the horrors of tax behind.
During my last year at university I was required to write an extended essay on tax, of around 8000 words. I can safely say that it was the most boring thing I have ever had to write. Before they set the paper, the lecturers gave us the option of writing the essay, or death. Several members of my class committed ritual suicide right then and there. My God, if only I had been as brave. Now, I like to write, but haphazardly throwing words around to try and make tax sound interesting was like break dancing at a funeral. The saddest thing in retrospect is that the tax essay was by far the most compelling thing I had to do in my entire degree.
A small part of me died all over again when I was asked to write a little something about tax in the UK, for a Kumamoto newspaper. I largely ignored the opinions that I actually wanted to give, as they would have been difficult for me to describe and probably quite, quite boring. Instead I opted to give them some one-dimensional sensationalist musings that showed how great Japan is in comparison to the UK, which was no doubt the predestined point of this fiasco. Something that instantly came to mind was the fact that in the UK, tobacco is taxed incredibly highly, making one pack of 20 cost around 1000-yen, compared to the 260-yen they are sold for in Japan. They loved it. The day the article came out, everywhere I went I was greeted with a chorus of,
“tabako sen en takai!” (1000-yen tobacco - expensive!)
Making your home country look bad is at the heart of any decent grassroots internationalisation campaign. Probably.
