Author: Kei Sumikawa

As you probably know, Japanese Road Traffic Act mandates the use of a child safety seat by any child under 6 years old. However, according to a survey conducted in 2013 by the National Police Agency and Japan Automobile Federation, the rate of a child safety seat use is 60.2% and 2 out of 3 parents use a child safety seat the wrong way.

Some of the most common installation mistakes include;

1) The waist belt used to position the child safety seat is too loose
If the child safety seat moves 3 centimeters or more by pulling the upper edge of it, the belt needs to be fastened more tightly.

2) The child safety seat is not well-fitted to a child’s body shape
Make sure the seat is selected based on your child’s body shape and size, not age.

3) The harness is not in the right place
Make sure the harness is correctly positioned according to the instructions.

4) The child safety seat is missing parts because it’s a hand-me-down
The seat with missing parts will lead to incorrect installation and cause a major accident.

The best thing to avoid the above installation mistakes is to follow product instructions. Even if your child safety seat is a hand-me-down and instructions are missing, you may be able to download from the websites or you can also call the company and ask them to send you the instructions.

Before driving, please make sure your child’s safety seat is installed correctly.
A few minutes of safety measures can save your beloved child.

Sakurako Yagi (Secretary)

Article abuot attorney Sumikawa on Yokohama Seasider magazine (thanks to the editors!).

Yokohama Seasider is a free magazine distributed around Yokohama city. They provide information about Yokohama, such as great restaurants around there. If you have chance to go to Yokohama, please find their copy at the information center.

https://www.yokohamaseasider.com/2014ine/04/sumikawa-kei/

In Japan, when you received a receipt at a shop or a restaurant for something over 30,000 yen, the shop/restaurant had to attach a revenue stamp to the receipt (200 yen stamp if the amount is under 1,000,000 yen).

From 1st April 2014, the least amount which is subject to taxation has changed from 30,000 yen to 50,000 yen. This is a big change for shop/restaurant owners, but is not very much known.

If you are a shop/restaurant owner, be sure to inform this matter to your staffs.

National Tax Agency (Japanese page)
https://www.nta.go.jp/shiraberu/ippanjoho/pamph/koho/campaign/h26/Jan/03.htm

Since 2004, the law required that the consumption tax (Shohi-zei) must be included in the price tag of the store. It was somewhat easy, because we could buy items without calculating the tax by ourselves.

As you know, the consumption tax is going to go up to 8% in this coming April, and is supposed to go up to 10 % in near future. This change obviously has a big impact on the tax-included price, and the store owners are required to change the price tags in such a short span.
With this change, the government has decided to adopt immediate measures and allowed the store owners not to use tax-included price, until 31st March 2017.

Therefore, you will see both the tax-included price and tax-excluded price mixed up together from April. Even if the cleanser you want is cheaper in one shop compared to the other shops, you might end up finding that price actually did not include tax.
For your information, major supermarkets have decided to use tax-excluded price.

Hazuki Kobayashi (Attorney at Law)

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It will be printed on the magazine “Yokohama Seasider”.

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