Tax time

A tax center

It began with a call to my cell.It was an unknown caller so I ignored it. 

That evening another call came. Same number, but not a number I knew. I Googled the number, but nothing came up. 

Finally - after six calls in three days and dragging a coworker into answering the phone with his burly voice - I discovered it was the tax branch of my company calling me.

Now, I am not what anyone would dream to label as a tax expert, so I can only explain based on what I can understand of taxes, which is very little. I know, for instance, I need to pay them. 

What the tax branch representative seemed to be saying, which was in rapid Japanese with a nice hint of extreme keigo, was, "Sorry, we can't file your taxes this year so you're going to have to file them yourself."

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Japanese companies file your taxes for you. Usually in November my company sends me this form asking me if I have any dependents and such, I fill out the form and send it back to them, and they calculate and send the tax forms. Every now and then I get a tax return. And that's it. 

This was the first time I'd have to go file on my own, however, and I was dreading it the way I had dreaded my double root canal. I had the feeling this would be just as painful. 

I found a tax center nearby with a security guard in the lobby. 

I held up the documents my company had sent me, and I literally said, "Sorry, I don't know what I'm doing."

The security guard nodded like I was not the first person to have said this to him and pointed me toward a line of people. He told me to get in that line.

Ten minutes later I repeated my genius phrase to another man behind a desk, who looked at my yearly pay slips and filled out parts of a form for me. He slipped everything into a clear plastic folder, handed them all back to me, and told me to get in another line. 

Another ten minutes and a woman ushered me over to a desk, where I filled out basic information on the form under the watchful eye of another man. The man went over my form, asked me to double check everything, then ushered me into another line to input this all into a computer. 

After waiting in another line another ten minutes, I had a guy basically clicking through the online application for me. I filled in all the basic information again, plus my income in the designated slots, and he would click or tell me what to click. 

I waited in another line to print those forms out, a woman told me to put them in a green box right behind me (and she held onto the form until I had put it halfway into the green box, then let go), and I was done. 

I walked out of the tax center completely stunned. 

At no point was my brain required for any of this. No part of the process had left me scratching my head wondering what on earth was going on. If I could write my name and address, I was already at the finish line for filing taxes in this country. 

How could it be so completely easy? How on earth could it have been so easy?

For years and years I've learned to dread doing taxes because either you are left biting your nails wondering if you interpreted the forms correctly or emptying your wallet to pay someone else to figure out your taxes for you. It's not a happy time of the year.

But here, in good 'ol Japan, I am apparently allowed to be absolutely clueless about the process of taxes because I just had to wait in a series of lines and wait for a series of people to do it all for me. For free. I was in and out the door no more aware of deductions and merits in Japan than I was before I walked in the door.