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NEWS: The Apothecary Diaries Manga Artist Nekokurage Pleads Guilty to Tax Evasion

To be a mangaka or to file taxes...although it's kind of funny how the actual Apothecary Diaries author got involved by telling them to "talk to a tax accountant."

Ah yes that is it, thank you. It is the Pareto Principle.

Never though I'd find people openly advocating breaking tax laws on ANN.

What I don’t understand is why they (she?) are still in trouble. It says they paid all taxes and fees they owed in 2022, so what is there left to be prosecuted for?

Given how many cases of tax evasion that we often see here and in general Japanese news, this kinda sounds less like a malice problem, but rather an educational one. Might be wrong, I dunno about details of tax declaration in Japan.
Perhaps someone living in Japan could clarify, but I'm a bit curious about this.

From what some expats living in Japan tell, it kinda sounded to me that it was pretty straightforward to pay taxes... in comparison to my country that is. I mean, it was still a whole day affair of pulling papers and whatnot, but still simple by comparison.

The system here is more or less like this - people with low income are mostly exempt. But middle class and up the vast majority of people end up needing to hire an accountant or at least have someone who knows how to fill in tax paperwork because it gets super complicated.

It is so complicated that errors are the norm, the burden of checking if it's correct or not goes towards the government (that is quickly becoming very efficient in doing so), they will check everything, and send you a fine plus the amount you still owe if something is wrong there. Of course, that's for common errors.

It usually does not automatically generate a tax evasion or fraud accusation.... unless you didn't even file anything to begin with. Which seems to be the case here. But also, in cases where there is evident falsification of receipts, contracts and other documents, that also goes to criminal court.

Not an accountant myself, so I'm clueless on the subject, but I've been trying to learn more about this... thus my curiosity.

If you steal a car and give it back you've still committed a crime.

Quote:

Nekokurage was indicted by The Fukuoka Regional Taxation Bureau on February 29 on suspicion of not declaring approximately 260 million yen (about US$1.6 million) in income and evading about 47 million yen (about US$298,887) in taxes from 2019-2021. According to the National Tax Bureau, the tax-evaded money, which includes income earned from manga sales, was used to purchase real estate.

I honestly had no idea manga artists could make that kind of money in a three year span. Is this normal? And that's just for an adaptation, I've always thought of manga adaptation artists as being on a lower rung compared to original creators (be it a single writer/artist or a duo) since they're likely assigned by a publisher and are happy to do whatever work they can get without much room to negotiate. I guess I wasn't prepared for those numbers.

Emerje

WANNFH wrote:

]Oh, it's pretty safe to say there the authors who made it big are cash-loaded, it's more like 95% of the industry are cannot breach the numbers and are on low side.

Yeah, I think this is likely it -- although, I really suspect it's way more uneven than this 95% suggests. Manga (/books/acting/etc) has an economic model similar to sports: there are only so many eyeballs, but given the ability of modern tech to transmit their work to billions of people, the industry can easily be dominated by a small number of people perceived to be 'the best' at their craft. In a setup like this, I generally expect the top incomes will take home really outsized percentage of overall profits, and the top incomes are almost completely uninformative about the median person's income in the industry.