Everything Sucks.

A long rant, but one with a reason.

While dealing with all the other insurmountable issues I am forced to face, out of the blue came another one. An update on it just hours old has me on my beam ends. There is likely to be evidence of my current mental state in the writing I am posting now.

I have not updated on the current situation here in Japan as it is too negative and I needed a break from it.  Can’t avoid the negativity of my situation but I can escape, if only briefly, from constantly replaying it.  I have done so recently by focusing on the Less Known Japan substack that Francis Turner invited me to collaborate on and participating in the endangered festivals of Japan.

This kind of escape is only temporary and I must get back to reality.  Where once about a third of my nursing students were unmasked, now all are during class.  Some remove their compliance rags during break but don them again once class starts back up.  Last Wednesday, a large portion of my med school students were unmasked when I entered.  All but one remasked once class started.   The week before, I saw my current nemesis there, the former big pharma employee who is all in on SDGs, ESG and all the rest.  She, masked, saw me, unmasked.   I expect that I have been reported once again and was expecting the mask fight at school last Wednesday.  Again, it didn’t happen but I needed to prepare myself incase it did. I am teaching mainly young women, most of whom have had the clot shots and the HPV shot. I have had one student get cervical cancer despite (because of ?) the required HPV shot and one of the students at the med school, not mine, that I know of almost died from the clot shot. Why in the hell am I, is anyone even bothering to teach them?

Instead of the mask battle i was prepared for, all we teachers have new and an unbelievable amount of BS to shovel through. The syllabus has been changed twice before the 3rd week of class.  The current biggest problem is the latest which provided all the teachers with the first review test we are to give next week.  We had been told that this test would be written by each individual teacher to match the classes they teach.  Now, after 2 weeks completed and on the eve of the 3rd, we are told that our students must be tested with the same test.  A previous issue that remains unresolved from a previous syllabus change is the mutually exclusive situations they demand we meet.  This coupled with the facts that the school and now the hospital are operating in the red, are under investigation for misuse of funds and tax evasion leaving the full time staff and faculty wondering if the school is going to be closed soon, this MAY all be a ploy to rid themselves of the old faculty members who are being paid far more than the new hires. Whether it is or not, no smooth sailing in these waters. Used to be my favorite place to work.

The yearly fights over air conditioning have resumed in earnest.  Twenty years of battling medical professionals and students on A/C use and masks has worn me out, especially after these past four years.

Pay day this month was nice.  For the first time since last summer, all my classes are in session.  Thus, a large couple of pay days.  Yeah!  However, I had just over ¥200,000 total deposited in my accounts for April’s work.  If all my classes continued year round, I would be earning just ¥2,400,000 for the entire year.  At ¥100 = $1., that’s just $24,000 a year.  But only about half my classes are year long and this extra earning period lasts for just 3 months.   I am making far below this paltry figure.

In this situation, we have this being reported in the Japan Times on May 15th, “Kishida defends planned rule to revoke foreigners' residency”, which reports, “The bill calls for allowing the government to revoke the permanent residence permits of foreigners if permit holders intentionally fail to pay taxes or social insurance premiums.”, and “Michishita urged the government to remove the provision, claiming that there were no legislative facts to justify its need and legitimacy.”  A more recent article reported that the provision has passed one vote so far.  It is going to be fact, sooner or later.

I pay taxes here, making the yearly short visit to the city tax office to do so.  It is the “social insurance premiums” that are the cause of my concern.  This will take some background as even many Japanese and gaijin living here long term are unaware that they may not be making the obligatory “social insurance premium” payments.

Social insurance premiums are NOT paid through taxes, they are payments that must be made separately.  If you work as an “ordinary worker” then your employer MAY pay these on your behalf.  For those that do not know, employers in Japan prepare the income tax returns for their full time employees and as many are already performing this task, they go ahead and make their employees’ social insurance premiums along with paying their income taxes.  For additional info, employees who have any income from sources outside their employer, investment income for one example, either notify their company to have this included in the tax return or they file amended returns on their own.  Most of the “ordinary employees” have little knowledge nor interest in any of these issues until they unwittingly run afoul of them.

If you are a “regular employee” and your employer is not paying the social insurance premiums as they should and you are not for whatever reason, you are living on borrowed time.  Japaneses are caught in the trap by getting injured or sick such as they can no longer work.  As soon as they are unemployed, the payments to the social insurance stops and, unless they go to the city office to make these payments on their own each month, while having no income, they lose their national health insurance.  No one tells them this until they need the assistance they have paid into until sick or injured.  This is a long standing issue that gets less coverage than the laptop belonging to the son of a certain world leader.  If Japanese know this, it is most likely because they or someone close to them have had their OMG moment at the city office.

Gaijin usually find out by going to the ATM and finding their money gone. Thinking there has been a mistake, they go to the bank and learn that the city office took it for unpaid bills. Confused, as they have paid all their taxes, they are stunned to learn that the national health insurance premiums are not paid with the taxes they pay and that they are many years in arrears of these payments. Japan Yokoso.

I learned of it through a different route.  When I arrived here to teach in late 2000, the question of whether or not we needed to pay into the national health care system was a hot topic among gaijin.  Not helping our cause, several well placed gaijin made lots of noise demanding that we be included.  One of these loudmouths has since returned to his native land.  Various paid and free publications catering to English speaking gaijin covered the debate.  Lawyers on both sides of the issue, both domestic and foreign living and working here gave compelling cases for each side.

I must state for the record, that I am against any kind of government healthcare system.  Yet, if I am obligated to join in a land I have chosen to live in but cannot vote in (not that I think I should be allowed to vote in Japan until/if I gained citizenship here.) I would do so.  Doing so would probably have had me returning to the States after I left the eikaiwa company I was then working full time for.  If I had known how bad the health care system is here and how expensive it is at that time, I am certain I would not have decided to stay on.  The reality of Japan with regard to the few they allow to reside and work here would be accurately summed up with the following motto: Japan Yokoso, Welcome to Japan and pay for our elderly’s health care because we spent all the money they paid into the national health care scheme on other things.  Yeah, sign me up!

Still, I had to answer the question of do we gaijin have to pay into the social insurance system.  Asking old timers here rendered nothing useful for solving this question though it provided experience useful for dealing with the panic.  The gaijin I knew who were working here were in one of two opposing camps.  One supported the national health system and said it was a human rights violation for Japan to not let us join it and that anyone who did not agree was an ultra rightist.  The other camp felt it was a violation of human rights to be forced to join it and claimed that they would never allow themselves to be forced into it.  Neither cared to actually dig and see if there views held any water here.    So I did.

I went to my ward office and asked.  I was asked if I had private insurance.  After replying that I did, I was informed that no, gaijin were not required to join the national health care scheme as long as we had private health insurance.  I asked a couple of other questions to make sure I understood correctly and went away happy to know that I did not need to pay into the system as long as I private insurance and that this came straight from the horse’s mouth.  And I lived much freer and happier until years later when two I knew, one a friend, the other a coworker, had their accounts drained by the city office for not paying the national health care premiums.

Obviously, either the city officer lied, was un or misinformed or something changed.  Depending on the municipality, they can and do take between 2 and 5 years worth of unpaid premiums straight from your bank account without notification.  You are then enrolled and must make the monthly payments there after.  The friend lives in the same prefecture and has the same number of kids as I do;  After he was caught he has had to pay ¥60,000 a month.  Except for my three months of fuller employment, this is either a full 1/3 to a full half of what I am currently making most months.  Can’t afford this and haven’t been able to for 20 years.  I do still have private insurance, but that apparently doesn’t cut it any more with the kleptocrats.  So, each payday, as early as I can, I run to the nearest ATM and withdraw all my pay.  This has been the case long before I learned that of FATCA/FBAR/CBT which takes the same trail as the social insurance van.  It has also been the situation long before the panic was foisted upon us.  And soon, I could now also lose my permanent residence visa because of this.   Yeah.

Update added while writing.  Japan Times today, May 28, 2024.  “Health ministry to collect data on insurance premium payments by foreign residents”

This article adds even more misery.  Not only are they looking at national health insurance payments, but national pension payments as well.  This I have chosen not to pay because it was not required.  But I made this decision only after learning that it too was not paid for out of the taxes I pay and that like the health insurance premiums, must be paid separately and when you do so, this too requires you to make up lost payments.  Further, I will not be able to draw upon it as you must pay into it for a full 20 years and I am not allowed to work that long until retirement due to my age, and contrary to what the article states, gaijin do NOT have the right to receive it when we retire.  We have the right to request it, and the request is often granted, but not always.  A court case years ago found that the city an elderly Chinese national retired in did not violate her rights by denying her the pension she paid into all her working life.  The facts of the case are such that she was a Chinese national who was “invited” to Japan during the war and gained Japanese citizenship, of a sort, but then lost it as a condition of Japan’s surrender.  Talk about poor treatment.

Discussing this case with the Brit friend who had his account raided for not paying national health insurance, he stated that even though we do not like the ruling, at least it followed the law.  Not all judgements here do.  They rarely rule in the favor of the little guy, JN or gaijin but even less for gaijin.  Years later I received a letter from my city office demanding that I pay the pension payments and payments in arrears.  My wife, who has out lawyered lawyers on multiple occasions, told me to throw it out, the payments are NOT mandatory and that the city office was lying by saying that they were and breaking the law with their threatening letter.  Now, for this too, I very well may be losing my Permanent Resident visa.

They even raid homes and take all cash they find within it, including kids’ piggy banks.  Not hyperbole.  They say that as they have no way to determine if the money in the piggy bank or envelopes with other family members’ names upon them are actually theirs or the delinquent premium payer, they can take it all, and they do.  They even take appliances and anything of value regardless of ownership.  In my case, I may be protected against this as my wife owns the house.  Japanese law prevents me from being on the deed.  She can tell them to go pound sand if they try to enter her home.  But will she?

So why do I burden you with sharing this?  There is a reason.  I have over 20 years experience dealing with these issues, the first ten without a clue what was behind them, but nonetheless able to see that something clearly was.  As with all things covid, trying to simply warn people of what was going on as I was unwittingly at the front of the assault elicited angry often bombastic reactions from those I sought to warn as well to enlist in stopping it.  “You are full of shit!  There is no way the U.S. Gov. can possibly know of my financial transactions overseas.”, is a typical reply.  Little did I know, that while I was warning of a likely future if we did not stop it, and they angrily denouncing such an idea, that what I was warning of was already then reality.

If you think you can run and hide, you are fooling yourself.  You are already in the net.  You just haven’t been hauled aboard yet.  You think you can stockpile supplies and hide in the wilderness?  If you can read this, they already know of your existence and intentions through the devices you use to read my rant and warning.  20 years ago, I was able to freely send and receive money to and from overseas with International Postal Money Orders.  I had money saved in my various banks accounts.  The only concerns to returning home to the U.S. were work schedules and airfare.  Checking the mailbox was at worst, a bit disappointing if there were no letters in it.  Going to the hospital was always a rare event for me but not one filled with terror.  I could pay off my credit cards in cash through ATMs.  Stopping at the police box to ask for directions was uncommon but not a fearful encounter.  I could easily send packages overseas, especially to the US.  Not anymore.

It has all changed.  International Postal Money Orders no longer exist.   Before their demise, progressively intrusive questions needed to be answered before I could cash or buy them and eventually, permission was required to cash them for amounts as low as $40. US.  Now we need permission to send packages overseas, especially to the US.  Fear of letters from the IRS, the city offices dealing with the pension and health insurance systems causes my stomach to churn each time I check the mail. This lessons over time after each new shock, but is omnipresent. Now I cannot return to the U.S. if I am wanting to return to Japan, out of fear of having my passport confiscated by the U.S., illegally, I will add.  Being gaijin carded by the police may have me detained and deported due to my passport already being revoked.  How would I know if it were?  I can no longer leave money in my bank accounts out of fear that the city office will seize it to cover unpaid national health insurance premiums; and now, as per the article just posted online by The Japan Times, for national pension payments too.  However, I can no longer pay my credit card bill with cash, meaning I must redeposit enough to cover it a few days before it is due and pray the city office does not visit the bank just before the bill is paid.  We have QR Code Only restrooms and cashless restaurants.  Many medical clinics and veterinarians no longer accept walk ins; you must first make an appointment online.  This is a very recent development.

Calls to just go to another restaurant that does not have QR code only menus or accepts cashless only payments ignores the fact that this will soon be universal.  Those who state that they will just pay with cash for what they need ignore the fact that no one will accept it if they cannot not use it to pay their bills.  Additionally, in the US we have that nasty civil forfeiture system whereby if you are stopped by the police, they are likely to search you and your vehicle and if a large amount of cash is found, take it all. Then what?

We are behind in this war.  We are just waking up to the fact that it even exists.  However, they have been strategically placing their assets, building their armies, stock piling their munitions for decades.  You really think that you and your family have the resources to even slow them down on your own?  You do not.  The only way to defeat this, is for all to fight it, not to run and hide.

But, this is not all I have to share with you this evening.  While at the one vet close to home that accepts walk ins I got a call from my wife.  Kid had a high fever and I must pick him up from school.  I find him lying down in the nurse’s room, masked.  As soon as we got outside, I had him remove it.  I said earlier, that because we did not defeat the mad maskers, you will be forced to wear a mask if ever you find yourself a patient and today I saw proof of this.  After well over 4 years, almost all employees who deal with customers face to face are still masked.  Seeing lots of kids masked.  Saw a man wearing a button down shirt with a necktie riding a bike wearing a bike helmet and a full on, rubber sealed, cartridge filter respirator during the trip between the vet and the school.

If still feverish tomorrow, my wife will take him to a clinic, if she can make an appointment online that is.

I keep reading that this or that aspect of this, our Brave New World, is a trial run for something.  Those who believe this are mistaken, this is it, the real deal.  Act accordingly.