Yen for Living

What? No iPhone for Taro Junior?

Softbank Corp. announced on Tuesday that its profits for the first three quarters of the current fiscal year rose 63 percent over the same period in fiscal 2008. Nice going in this particular environment; which automatically raises the question: What is the company going to do with all that money in terms of the people who work for them?

Actually, Softbank and its group companies — Softbank Mobile, Softbank BB and Softbank Telecom — have a corporate policy that stresses the importance of its employees’ lives while addressing social problems such as the declining birthrate. That’s why Softbank introduced the shussan iwai-kin (birth celebration money) system some years ago and even upgraded it in April 2007. With this system, full-time employees who have worked for the company at least one year are given a bonus of ¥50,000 when they have their first child, ¥100,000 when they have their second child, ¥1,000,000 for the third, ¥3,000,000 for the fourth, and ¥5,000,000 for the fifth.

So far there has only been one employee who has scored the jackpot with a fifth kid, but since 2007 there have been 12 who have claimed the ¥3,000,000 bonus with their respective fourth offsprings. There are other companies that also offer bonuses for babies, but I can’t find any that provide these big payouts for fourth and fifth births.

Pretty sweet, and certainly a good reason to stay with Softbank if you’re planning a big family. But how is Softbank in terms of maternity and paternity leaves, which is another gauge of corporate concern for employee welfare? A closer look at the company’s home page revealed this:

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If you can read the fine print then you can't move in

Advertorial supplements are pretty common these days in newspapers, and often they focus on one subject. A topic I see a lot lately is assisted living facilities for seniors, sometimes two or three times month. Despite Japan’s storied respect for the aged, old age homes, derisively referred to as rojin homu, were never very popular until the last decade when the kaigo hoken (nursing care insurance) system was enacted, thus directly and indirectly providing government assistance for start-up businesses. With the economy lagging and the population aging faster than you can say “hip replacement surgery,” assistant living facilities have become a growth business, though if you take a look at the ads in the supplements it’s easy to get the feeling that all old people in Japan are rich.

The main sticking point is the “moving in fee” (nyukyohiyo), which tends to run anwhere from ¥50 to 90 million; in other words, the price of an expensive house or condominium. These fees are “deposits” to a certain extent. Usually about 10 percent are automatically deducted when a contract is signed, and then over the next 10  years it is treated like depreciation. If you “leave” the facility before the 10 years elapses an appropriate portion of the deposit is returned to you or our heirs depending on how long you have stayed. Of course, “leaving” in most cases means “dying,” so you get the idea. On top of that, the “tenant” pays a substantial monthly rent for his or her unit, which can be a simple room or a full apartment with kitchen. Then there are lots of add-ons, the main one being meals, but, of course, with assisted living there tend to be different grades of “care.” That’s where the real money comes in. One’s monthly rent can double or triple depending on one’s physical condition.

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Tell mom what you want for next Christmas

The government wants to increase the tax exemption on gifts that parents give to their children, so if your folks were inspired by the largesse of Yasuko Hatoyama to her three kids — one of whom is the prime minster and got into hot water because of that largesse — they’ll be able to give you up to ¥20 million tax free, if land minister Seiji Maehara gets his way.

According to the media, however, he may not get all he wants. Maehara is in charge of keeping the housing market humming, and following the Liberal Democratic Party’s lead last spring, when the former ruling party allowed tax exemptions for gifts of up to ¥6 million as long as they were spent to buy or improve residential housing, he wants to increase the exemption in the next budget.

Basically, the idea is that there is some ¥1,400 trillion not circulating in Japan, but rather just sitting in people’s bank accounts or in their mattresses (or, to put in Japanese terms, in the tansu, or wardrobe). About half of this dormant money is in the possession of Japan’s elderly. Normally, when these people die, the money goes to their offspring, who, in turn, just put it into their own back accounts or in their own wardrobes. Since people live quite long in Japan, their children usually are already settled with their own homes when their parents die. The LDP’s scheme was to persuade these older people to give some of their money to their kids (or grandkids) earlier, while they’re still alive, at a time when they are thinking of buying homes.

Continue reading about tax exemptions for monetary gifts →