Yen for Living

Note: this is not a public road

When the automobile industry slumps, it takes a bunch of other industries down with it. Take driving schools. Twenty years ago it was a great business to be in since it seemed everyone wanted a driver’s license and, owing to Japan’s cramped road conditions and love affair with red tape, there were lots of opportunities to make a lot of money helping those people obtain driver’s licenses. Unlike in the U.S., where many public schools have driver’s education programs (or, at least, used to) and most youngsters learn how to drive right there on public streets and obtain their permits before they graduate from high school, in Japan the restrictions against learners driving on streets force people to take lessons in for-profit driving schools, which charge dearly by the hour and more or less decide when you are ready to take your road test. It’s a time-consuming endeavor, so most people don’t do it until they are in college or thereafter, and traditionally it was normal for an individual to spend ¥200,000 to ¥300,000 on lessons before actually obtaining a license.

In 1960 there were 125 driving schools throughout Japan. Ten years later this number had increased tenfold and pretty much stayed constant until the 90s. The population of 18-year-olds peaked in 1992, and between 1990 and 2008 104 driving schools went out of business. Competition among those who remained has become fiercer and fiercer. About 1.6 million people obtained driver’s licenses in 1999. Only 1.2 million obtained them in 2008, a drop of 30 percent.

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Ibaraki Airport parking lot: You can even ride your bicycle there!

The media has been buzzing about Ibaraki Airport, which opened for business last Thursday with one-count-’em-one flight from Seoul; that is, if you don’t count the “commemorative flight” from Ibaraki to Haneda, which we assume didn’t reach cruising altitude. A second daily flight will start next month between Ibaraki and Kobe on Skymark, which has already offered a nice deal to drum up business at the airport. If you take that flight and transfer to a Skymark flight to Naha, the entire trip will only cost you only ¥13,600.

Cheap! But one thing you always have to factor in when you fly anywhere, and especially in Japan, is the cost of getting to the airport. Despite the fact that the Ibaraki airport authorities are trying to sell their baby as the third airport in the Tokyo metropolitan area, it’s highly doubtful that anyone except Ibarakians (Ibarakiites?) will use it, and even that’s in doubt. Before it opened, the airport is projected to be ¥20 million in the red for the first year of operation. When it was being planned some 20 years ago it was estimated that 810,000 people a year would use it. Media have since reduced that number to 220,000, and the prefecture now only predicts 167,000.

If Ibaraki wants a peek at its future, it doesn’t have to look farther than 100 km away to Fukushima Airport, which for reasons nobody has ever explained satisfactorily, was also touted as a Tokyo metropolitan airport when it opened in 1993. The number of passengers has since dropped steadily and now it only offers three flights a day, and all to Seoul.

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From heaven Audrey guarantees that your donation to UNICEF is tax deductible

Around this time of year, letters to the editors sections of the national newspapers are filled with tales of people filing income tax returns and coming away confused. One 65-year-old man wrote to the Asahi Shimbun recently about tax deductions for donations to charities and non-profit organizations. He brought receipts for four donations he made, and the tax office accepted two of them, one for UNICEF and the other for Doctors Without Borders, but rejected the other two, both of which were for contributions he made to local NPOs who worked with homeless people. The letter writer was understandably disappointed and quoted the well-know physician, Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, who is a strong advocate for a broad and transparent tax deduction system so that Japanese people will contribute more freely.

Japanese people donate about ¥260 billion a year to charities, while Americans donate about ¥20.4 trillion, or 8 times as much. Accordingly, Japan has been called, usually by the Japanese themselves, a “no-donation culture,” which makes it sound as if the very idea of contributing to charities were something they can’t get their heads around. This is a myth, or, at least, a convenient means of explaining the lack of structural encouragement for donations. Almost every day on the news you see people collecting money for immediate, specific needs, like earthquake relief or overseas surgery for some poor sick kid, and people always give, but in those situations we’re talking small change. On a larger level people don’t give because they are not encouraged to do so.

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See that second button from the left? Press it. It won't hurt you.

The only thing I have against Tokyo’s two subway systems is that they don’t run 24 hours a day, though that may change for one of them. In almost every other aspect I think they’re pretty terrific, and since Tokyo Metro is cheaper than the Toei subway network, it’s even more terrific. Does that sound funny, calling something in Japan cheap? In terms of average fares, it’s actually one of the cheapest in the world. Of all the world capitals, only Mexico City, Beijing, Seoul and Moscow are cheaper. And considering how clean and reliable the Metro is, it’s even more of a bargain.

And because it’s cheap patrons may take it for granted. Since the advent of the PASMO rechargeable smart card, which enables mass transit users in the Tokyo metropolitan area to enter and exit stations, as well as transfer from one mode of transport to another, without the need for tickets, Tokyo Metro has increased the number of wickets in stations that don’t take tickets. PASMO and JR’s Suica card obviate the need to buy individual tickets, and thus save time and resources, but they don’t necessarily save money. If your PASMO is also a Tokyo Metro credit card you can earn points when you ride that can be used for discounts, but the discount comes out to less than one percent. However, if you buy tickets of the same value in multiples of 10 from either Tokyo Metro or JR, you get an 11th for free, meaning a discount of 10 percent. These multiple tickets are called kaisuken.

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Hello Kitty wants you to relax on weekdays and Sundays

A year ago when the Liberal Democratic Party reduced highway tolls to a maximum of ¥1,000 on designated expressways for passenger cars on weekends, the stated reason was to stimulate the economy, and to a certain extent it worked. Gas consumption went up and highway rest areas saw booming business.

But tourist destinations didn’t necessarily benefit, mainly because people who used the ¥1,000 toll as an excuse to get the family out of the house didn’t stay overnight anywhere. If families or even individuals took advantage of the lower tolls, it was for day excursions. There are many reasons for that, but the obvious one is that Japanese accommodations are most expensive on Saturday nights. In fact, a tourist industry symposium reported late last year that after the highway toll reduction went into effect there was a 6 percent drop in weekday tourist business, which had been gradually growing in recent years, and this drop was not necessarily compensated on the weekend.

For years, the tourist industry has been trying to boost demand for weekday travel, but it’s difficult in Japan where holiday periods are set in stone and full-time workers are still reluctant to ask for days off for reasons of recreation. The average full-time employee in Japan is entitled to 18 days of paid vacation a year, but only uses half that time. The symposium estimates that if all these workers used their paid vacations in full, the Japanese economy would benefit by ¥16 trillion and 1.88 million new jobs. You wouldn’t need foreign tourists if everyone took their rightful time off.

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Step right up!

Sports tabloids are all gaga over the latest offering of the soccer lottery known as BIG. Thanks to a record carryover of ¥2.5 billion from last year’s BIG lotteries, top prizes for the next round will be ¥600 million, which, if history is any indication, should result on a huge rush on BIG lottery tickets. In the annals of the game there has been a total of 118 first prize winners, 80 of which won ¥600 million each. In 2007, the first time such a huge jackpot was offered, the system broke down because demand was too high.

It’s also a huge turnaround for the somewhat euphemistically named National Agency for Advancement of Sports and Health, which runs the various soccer-related lotteries under the “toto” banner. When it was launched back in 2001, toto was closer to a betting game than a lottery. Players choose which J.League teams will win in certain sets of games, and a player wins the jackpot (¥200 million maxiumum) if he or she chooses correctly on all the games listed. For whatever reason the system never really took off and lost money in the beginning.

In 2006 the agency started BIG, which removed all the brain work: a computer “guesses” the winners at random. This totally serendipitous version of toto became extremely popular, probably because the odds of actually winning a top prize (1 in 4.8 million) were greater than those for winning the standard Takarakuji lottery (1 in 10 million).

And the odds for this round of BIG are even better — 1 in 2.9 million. Tickets, each of which costs ¥300, started going on sale Feb. 18 and will continue until March 6, which is the first day of the new J.League season. Over the years, some commentators have complained about the soccer lotteries, saying that it sets a bad example, especially for children, to raise money for various national sports endeavors (including the Olympics) through gambling. But, in a way, BIG isn’t gambling; or, at least, it isn’t gambling the way toto is. Whether it’s a waste of money probably depends on if you win.

The is the kind of rental the government probably has in mind

One of the economic countermeasures adopted by the previous administration of Taro Aso that has been retained by the Democratic Party of Japan was the allowance for people who had lost their housing as a direct result of having lost their jobs. In most cases, the reason they lost their housing was because the place they were living in was either owned or subsidized by their employers. The DPJ plan originally earmarked ¥70 billion for this allowance, and an additional ¥30 billion has been set aside for it in the supplemental budget.

Local governments started accepting applications for the allowance last October. Rent subsidies last for six to nine months and the amount of the allowance depends on the location and other factors. For Tokyo residents, it comes to ¥69,000 a month for a “family” and ¥53,700 a month for a single person. The allowances would be handled by the welfare ministry in collaboration with local governments.

The ¥70 billion that has been set aside was calculated to cover 320,000 people. However, during the first three months that applications were accepted only 11,518 people applied and about 7,900 of them have so far qualified for the allowance. Local governments blame poor communications for the low demand, but there’s another, more significant reason why people aren’t flooding welfare offices to apply: They know it won’t mean anything.

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