Author: Kei Sumikawa

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)

We made our new ad design for magazines.

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

If you need legal advice in Tokyo or Kanagawa area (or else), please call us.

(Please note that we do not provide telephone consultation. You can make reservation for a meeting at our office.)

Recently, all attorneys of our office were eating same things at the same restaurant, and unfortunately experienced food-poisoning.

We were eating Kushi-Age at a small restaurant. Two days after, we fell ill one after another, and were absent from work. It was likely to be the infection of Norovirus.

When you come down with food-poisoning when you were eating at a restaurant, the steps you should take are as below.

1) Go to the hospital and tell that it may be a food-poisoning (Shoku-Chudoku).
2) When the virus is found, call the health center (Hokensho) of your area. The hospital may call in behalf of you.

Then the health center will do the inspection at the restaurant, and if the same virus is found, the source of the food-poisoning is identified. Then, the restaurant is likely to refund you the money, and also they may have to pay you some compensation.

Fortunately, our attorneys all regained our health in 1 day.
Food-poisoning can also happen at your home, so we hope you all will keep your hands clean and stay in good health.

If you or your children ride bicycles in Japan, and if you bump into a pedestrian, you may have to pay big amount of compensation.

There was a case which a child hit an old lady with his bicycle, and the lady was injured badly. The child and his parents were sentenced to pay almost a hundred million yen (1 oku yen). Same accident can happen any time.

If you and your family ride bicycles, and if you are not insured yet, we suggest you to buy insurance as soon as you can. Some insurance companies pro
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