The tax break that turned Japan into a catalogue

Nearly sixty million times in the last fiscal year, someone in Japan chose a town they may never have seen and sent it money instead of their own city hall. The towns, in return, have become good at describing themselves.

Night Desk, LiveTokyo · pages read on the night of 5 September 2026 · published 6 September 2026

At 22:58 on a Saturday night I had two windows open. In one, the list of the 69 cameras on this site. In the other, a city I knew only as the place with the seal camera was offering me a kilogram of frozen scallops from the Sea of Okhotsk for a 14,000 yen donation. The page carried a greeting from the mayor and a line across the top saying the city had been first in the whole country four years running. Not for scallops. For the number of tax donations it received.

From outside Japan that sentence needs a paragraph of explanation, so here is the ministry's version of it, and then the scallops.

Drawing: a desk at night with two screens. One shows a street crossing with a few figures and a bicycle; the other shows a catalogue page with small pictures of scallops, a jar of roe, a block of butter, a seal and a bag of rice.

The rule

Furusato nozei translates as "hometown tax", and it is neither about your hometown nor, legally, a tax. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications runs it, and its portal describes the transaction in one sentence. You give money to a prefecture or a municipality of your choice. "The donation minus 2,000 yen", up to a ceiling, comes off your income tax and your resident tax, so that "for a real cost of 2,000 yen" you pick where your tax goes. The town you chose says thank you with a gift.

The qualifications take a second paragraph. The ceiling depends on your income; the special part of the deduction is capped at two-tenths of your resident-tax income levy. Since the 2015 tax reform a salaried person who gives to five places or fewer can skip the tax return. The law caps what a town may spend on the gift at three-tenths of your donation, and a ministry notice caps everything it spends on raising the money, gift and shipping and advertising and portal fees together, at half. The ministry's FAQ adds that no rule limits which municipality you choose: your birthplace, a place you owe something to, a place you would like to support.

The name comes from the argument that started it. The ministry's explainer quotes the 2007 study group that proposed the scheme. People are born in the regions, are schooled and doctored there, then move to the city for university or work and pay their taxes in the city. "Even if you live in the city now," the group asked, "shouldn't there be a system that lets you pay some of your tax, by your own choice, to the hometown that raised you?" The Diet passed the law that created it in 2008. A court judgment I will come to records one more fact about those first years: there were no rules about gifts at all.

How much of this is going on

The ministry publishes a survey every summer. The one dated 31 July 2026 says that in the fiscal year that ended in March 2026, prefectures and municipalities took in about 1.3314 trillion yen through the scheme, in about 59.63 million separate donations. The same series begins in fiscal 2008, the scheme's first year, at 8.14 billion yen and 54,000 donations.

A second table in the same report counts the other side: the people who claimed the deduction, when this year's resident tax was assessed, for donations they made in calendar 2025. About 11.51 million of them, and about 952.4 billion yen of resident tax that did not go to the place they live. The two tables run on different clocks, one fiscal year and one calendar year, so I have not divided one by the other.

The money does not travel on its own. The report says 97.2 per cent of it came in through portal sites, the catalogues, and that the towns paid the portal operators 243.3 billion yen, 18.8 per cent of what came through them. Add the gifts, the shipping and the paperwork and the towns spent 47.9 per cent of what came in on getting it to come in; 52.1 per cent was left for the town. The ministry prints these figures itself, a page before the note that from this autumn's designation round the share a town keeps must rise, in steps, to 60 per cent by the 2029 round.

Two tables, one country

Page eleven of the report holds two lists. On the left, the twenty municipalities that took in the most in the fiscal year to March 2026. On the right, the twenty whose residents deducted the most for their 2025 donations, which is to say the twenty that lost the most.

	Received the most (FY to March 2026)	million yen	Lost the most (2025 donations)	million yen
1	Izumisano, Osaka	23,039	Yokohama	37,330
2	Shiranuka, Hokkaido	22,329	Nagoya	21,532
3	Miyakonojo, Miyazaki	21,646	Osaka city	20,703
4	Betsukai, Hokkaido	21,155	Kawasaki	17,032
5	Nagoya	17,446	Setagaya ward, Tokyo	13,442
8	Kyoto city	13,258	Kobe	11,064
9	Monbetsu, Hokkaido	12,473	Sapporo	10,968
10	Nemuro, Hokkaido	12,263	Kyoto city	9,791
20	Minamiuonuma, Niigata	6,900	Shibuya ward, Tokyo	5,961

Rows picked from the ministry's two top-20 lists (survey dated 31 July 2026, page 11). Left: donations received in the fiscal year April 2025 to March 2026. Right: resident tax deducted for donations made in calendar 2025. Different periods, so the two columns are not a balance sheet.

Izumisano, a city in Osaka Prefecture beside Kansai airport, leads the left column at 23.0 billion yen from 1,351,688 donations. Shiranuka, a town on the Pacific coast of Hokkaido, is second at 22.3 billion yen from 1,276,246 donations. Shiranuka's population page, updated on 2 September, gives its population on 31 July as 6,704. The division comes out at about 190 donations in a year for every person who lives there. Miyakonojo, a city in Miyazaki, is third. Betsukai, in the far east of Hokkaido, is fourth, and its home page prints, in the same box as its population of 13,635, the number of its cows: 111,693, which the town works out as about 8.2 times the people.

Yokohama leads the right column: 496,275 residents deducted 37.3 billion yen between them. Shibuya ward, the one with the crossing, is twentieth, with 46,759 people and 6.0 billion yen. Two names appear in both columns. Nagoya took in 17.4 billion yen; its residents' deductions came to 21.5 billion. Kyoto took in 13.3 billion; its residents' deductions came to 9.8 billion. The two figures in each pair cover different periods, as the table says.

I checked the two lists against this site's own camera list. Of the 69 cameras here, 23 stand in a city or ward on the losing side, among them Yokohama's skyline, Nagoya station, Dotonbori, Hakata station, Kobe's port tower, the Tanukikoji camera in Sapporo, Tokyo Tower and three more in Minato ward, Haneda, two in Sendai and the two in Shibuya. Seven stand on the receiving side: Nagoya station again; the five Kyoto cameras, from Kiyomizu-zaka to Arashiyama, which count on both sides at once; and Monbetsu, which brings me back to the scallops.

What the towns say about themselves

Monbetsu is ninth on the receiving list, 12.5 billion yen from 593,559 donations. Its furusato page introduces a city of 20,000 people in the middle of the Okhotsk coast that lives by fishing, farming, forestry and fish processing, and the line at the top says the city was first in the country for the number of donations four years running, 2020 to 2023, citing the ministry's survey. The gifts, in the page's words: "Okhotsk scallops, frozen (1kg)" for a 14,000 yen donation; trout roe in soy; a set of butter from the Yotsuba dairy, made in a huge rotating dice-shaped box called a churn that, of all Yotsuba's plants, only the Monbetsu one has; and "Monbetsu's famous drift-ice kelp-cured beef tongue". The mayor's greeting lists what the money pays for, and the first item is the protection of seals and the marine environment of the Sea of Okhotsk. The camera on this site points at those seals.

Betsukai sends dairy from what it calls the largest raw-milk production in Japan, with scallops, surf clams and salmon roe, and the last of the eight things it spends donations on pairs disaster preparedness, naming an earthquake on the Kuril Trench, with digitalisation and the strengthening of the town's own governing base. Nemuro, tenth on the list, puts "the promotion of a solution to the Northern Territories problem" among its eight projects: public opinion on the islands' return, and training the next generation to demand it. Shiranuka introduces itself with smelt, hairy crab, octopus, salmon and whelks from the sea, and the perilla for a shochu called Tantakatan, cheese, lamb and venison from the land. The scheme is from 2008. Shiranuka's thank-you gifts, by the town's own account, began on 15 October 2015. The 1.3 million donations are from the last fiscal year.

The cities in the right-hand column are in the catalogue too. Kyoto's furusato site, when I opened it at 22:59, led its popular gifts with travel points for a 10,000 yen donation and then ran through hotel vouchers: 300,000 yen at Aman Kyoto for a donation of 1,000,000 yen, 30,000 yen at HOTEL THE MITSUI KYOTO for 100,000, 150,000 yen at the Hiiragiya inn for 500,000. Three-tenths, to the yen. Among the eight things Kyoto lets a donor pay for is "support Kyoto's city buses and subway". Nagoya offers a coaster with Ukrainian embroidery for a 5,000 yen donation to its fund for people who fled Ukraine, a golden-shachi annual pass to Nagoya Castle for 10,000 yen towards the castle keep, and shibori-dyed goods from Arimatsu for 15,000. Nagoya has a city-bus-and-subway fund too, and tells people who live in Nagoya that the gifts are not for them.

The shelf the ministry allows

The ministry's question-and-answer document for municipalities, dated 1 April 2026, decides what counts as a hometown gift, and it spends pages on edge cases. Not allowed: cakes made elsewhere by a pastry chef who happens to have been born in the town; anything whose only local content is the town's name on the wrapping paper; a meal at a restaurant chain that has a branch in town; home-delivery dry cleaning you can use without going there. Allowed, in the ministry's list of services with a real local connection: admission to the town's own museum; a seat at the town's fireworks; "a one-day experience as the head of the municipality, within the municipality"; and "grave-cleaning services, snow-clearing services and watching-over services provided within the municipality". A plane ticket to the town on its own does not count. A ticket that comes with a night's stay there does.

The survey's example of the experience type is Minamiuonuma in Niigata, twentieth on the receiving list, where a family stays in town for one or two weeks while the children attend a local nursery school; the report says the programme took in 1.6 million yen in the last fiscal year. I went looking for the grave-cleaning and the mayor-for-a-day on the portals themselves and got a 403 for every product page I asked for. What did open was Kiryu, a city in Gunma, whose page offers the watching-over version in the flesh. For a 100,000 yen donation, a post-office worker visits someone who lives in Kiryu once a month for a year, asks ten set questions about how they are getting on, and emails the answers to the family. Three months costs 25,000. There is a telephone version, an automated call every day, for less.

The referee

The ministry does not only count. In 2019 it brought in a designation system and, that May, declined to designate four municipalities, Izumisano among them. Its stated grounds: they had gone on offering gifts worth more than three-tenths and not local, had added "Amazon gift cards and the like" to their lists, and had each raised more than 5 billion yen between November and March doing it. Izumisano's receipts for fiscal 2018, in the ministry's paper, were 40.8 billion yen. Izumisano sued. On 30 June 2020 the Supreme Court, in case 2020 (Gyo-Hi) No. 68, set aside the high court's ruling and cancelled the ministry's decision. I read the judgment from the scan the city keeps on its website, and the mayor's statement of the same day, which says the win covered only that one year and guaranteed nothing about the future. Six years on, Izumisano is designated again, first on the receiving list, and taking donations through 26 portal sites by its own count.

Then the points. Portal sites had been giving donors loyalty points on top of the town's gift. In June 2024 the ministry told municipalities they could no longer raise money through sites that did, from the designation period beginning 1 October 2025. Rakuten, whose furusato portal sits inside its shopping mall, ran a petition against the ban; the petition page records 2,952,819 signatures by 16 March 2025, and Rakuten's chairman handing them to the prime minister two days later. The page is still up. So is the notice explaining that from 1 October 2025 a furusato donation on Rakuten no longer earns mall points, though the points a card company gives for using its card continue.

Then the wording. On 20 August 2026 the ministry sent municipalities a one-page letter. Some portal pages, it said, were describing gifts with words like kosupa (value for money), "special donation amount", "household support" and "inflation support", all of which make a donor think the required donation is a bargain, and all of which it considers likely to breach the rules on soliciting. When a portal company writes those words, the letter adds, it is still the municipality that stands to lose its designation.

The other shelf

The catalogue has a second aisle with no gifts in it at all. The disaster-support section of Furusato Choice, last updated by its own clock at 22:54 on 5 September, listed five current emergencies, four of them from this year: an earthquake in Kumamoto, and August floods in Chiba, in Ishikawa and Toyama, and in Fukui. Its counter read 12,102,714,311 yen given through the section since it began. The site explains the arrangement it calls proxy donation. A town that was not hit receives the money and issues the tax receipts on behalf of one that was, because a receipt is a job only a municipality can do, and the last thing a flooded town hall needs. Shiranuka, the smelt and crab town, is doing exactly that on its page for Ashikita, a town in Kumamoto hit by this year's earthquake: "no thank-you gifts, as this is disaster-support giving." Furusato Choice's page for Wajima, the city on the Noto peninsula hit by the 2024 earthquake, showed 224,029,965 yen from 8,468 donations when it was last updated on 13 February 2026, with a note that these are amounts pledged, not all of them yet received. Izumisano lists its own run of them: Ishikawa after the 2024 Noto earthquake, Wajima after the floods that followed it, Myanmar after its earthquake, and an emergency fund for Ukraine in 2022 that raised 88,618,162 yen, which the city paid over to the embassy and the Red Cross.

If you live here

Readers outside Japan ask who is allowed to do this. The ministry's FAQ says the deduction goes to the person who pays the income tax and the resident tax, in their own name. Its page on resident tax says the tax falls on whoever has an address in a municipality on 1 January. Neither page, nor the National Tax Agency's, mentions nationality anywhere; I read all thirteen questions of the FAQ to be sure. If you live in Japan and pay its taxes, the catalogue is written for you too. The ministry's page, not this one, is where to check your ceiling before you count on it, and a tax professional is who to ask.

Where to look

The ministry's portal is at soumu.go.jp, and the survey I have been quoting is a fifteen-page PDF. The catalogues themselves are in Japanese. Furusato Choice says it lists more than 760,000 gifts from more than 1,700 municipalities, a claim it rests on a survey of four large portals from October 2024. Rakuten Furusato Nozei is the one with the petition. Satofull would not load for me at all that night, and Furunavi answered with a 403, which is what a catalogue looks like when it has decided you are a robot. The airlines run their own: ANA's stopped crediting miles for donations completed after 30 September 2025, the night before the points ban, while JAL's still lets you turn miles into points to donate with. au PAY's is headed "furusato nozei with Ponta points", and Furupo belongs to JTB, the travel agency, and sells the scheme as a way to book a hotel.

Then open a camera. Kiyomizu-zaka in Kyoto is on both lists. The crossing in Shibuya belongs to a ward on the losing one. The seals at Monbetsu are the first line of a mayor's list of what the money is for. Watch that one for a while.

The links to portal sites above are plain links. LiveTokyo has no advertising or affiliate arrangement with any of them, or with any town.