A recent comment from a neighbor about Kamogawa’s taxes being high piqued my curiosity. Does Kamogawa charge more tax than other places? The answer is complicated, but I learned quite a lot about how taxes are levied and also what might have been behind the feeling that our taxes are high.
Residence Tax
住民税
Jumin zei is the state/local level tax. It is quite flat across the country: a 4000 yen per person fee + 10% of salary. The amount collected is divided between prefecture (1,000 yen + 4%) and municipality (3000 yen + 6%). These taxes pay for roads and public services. There are a handful of towns that take a bit more for environmental projects, but Kamogawa follows the standard of 4000 + 10%.
Fixed Asset Tax
固定資産税
Koteishizan zei is what we’d call “property tax” in the US. There’s a standard rate of 1.4% nationwide, and municipalities can set it higher. Cities are also able to levy an additional tax in “urbanization zones.” Kamogawa does neither and fixed asset tax here is 1.4%.
National Health Insurance
国民健康保険税
Kokumin kenkohoken zei (aka kokuho) is where it gets complicated. There are three parts to the standard National Health tax bill; all three together combine into one annual levy.
- Income-based rate
- Per person rate
- Per household rate
A quick note on the per-household rate: this is billed only to the “head of household” on record. It’s the same flat fee whether your household is one person or a family of seven. You can think of it as a family discount. Unfortunately, 41% of Kamogawa’s households are single person (and 40% of those are elderly people), so a lot of people are bearing both flat fees themselves.
Not every city bills this way. Tokyo, for example, doesn’t have a “per household” fee. Some cities combine long-term care and other health-related fees into the per-person levy. This makes it challenging to compare. But locally, we do have some cities we can fairly compare.
Here’s a table of 2026 National Health Insurance tax levies in southern Chiba:
Even with the same billing items, you can see how complicated the comparison is. Tateyama has the highest income percentage; Kamogawa has the highest per-household; Minamiboso has the highest per-person.
If you add together the flat rates, Kamogawa is the lowest of the three at 83,500 yen for the head of household. Tateyama bills 86,500; Minamiboso 85,800.
So Kamogawa’s health insurance tax isn’t the highest in the area.
Kamogawa should be charging more. Chiba Prefecture publishes a “standard reference rate” for kokuho. It shows what each municipality’s rate would need to be if it covered 100% of costs from tax premiums. Most cities stick close to the reference rate. Kamogawa’s reference rate is 15.48% but its income-based tax is 12.54%. That means the city subsidises almost 3% our healthcare from general tax revenue and reserves. It’s not just Kamogawa. Isumi has the highest reference rate in Chiba but charges its residents 5.3% below that.
Is subsidising the reference rate a sound policy? Probably not in the long term. This discrepancy is one of the reasons that Kamogawa is in a bad financial state. We residents don’t pull our weight on the healthcare tax. But on the upside, it means that Kamogawa residents (Kamogawians?) get a National Health bill in line with similar-sized cities in Chiba.
How does Kamogawa rank nationally? Well, the good news is that Chiba has the lowest lowest medical costs in the nation. That means our health insurance premiums are lower, too.
Kamogawa ranks in the higher end of the least-expensive prefecture. We are getting tax bills around the same as cities with similar demographics (population ~30,000 with above average age) thanks to the complicated billing arrangements. So a fair comparison is almost impossible, but here is what I was able to pull together:
| Town | Pop. | Elderly % (65+) | Income based 所得割 | Per-person 均等割 | Per-household 平等割 | Combined flat levies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kamogawa, Chiba | 30,209 | 39.6% | 12.54% | ¥55,300 | ¥28,600 | ¥83,900 |
| Kazuno, Akita | 27,069 | 42.5% | 13.5% | ¥33,900 | ¥44,500 | ¥78,400 |
| Gotō, Nagasaki | 33,739 | 42.8% | 13.99% | ¥41,200 | ¥29,600 | ¥70,800 |
| Ōno, Fukui | 29,821 | 38.5% | 11.79% | ¥50,450 | ¥33,600 | ¥84,050 |
| Saito, Miyazaki | 28,078 | 38.8% | 13.43% | ¥45,900 | ¥41,700 | ¥87,600 |
| Myōkō, Niigata | 29,514 | 37.8% | 15.54% | ¥39,600 | ¥26,600 | ¥66,200 |
| Nagato, Yamaguchi | 30,920 | 44.8% | 15.62% | ¥45,270 | ¥39,060 | ¥84,300 |
| Akitakata, Hiroshima | 26,448 | 42.1% | 12.34% | ¥50,200 | ¥30,700 | ¥81,000 |
That’s good to see, but it still doesn’t address my neighbor’s comment about high taxes.
A lot of people who relocate to Kamogawa are coming from Tokyo. Maybe that’s the comparison to make. And again…complicated. Tokyo has no per-household levy, only per-person. Average salary in Tokyo is 1.75x higher than Kamogawa (and even higher in the well-to-do areas like Minato and Chiyoda).
Regardless of those differences, I compared to see what a kokuho bill would be for the average person in Kamogawa and in Tokyo.
| Kamogawa | Tokyo (23-ku standard) | |
|---|---|---|
| Average income (taxpayer basis) | ¥2,765,000 | ¥4,850,000 |
| Taxable base (after ¥430k deduction) | ¥2,335,000 | ¥4,420,000 |
| Income-based kokuho | (12.54%) ¥292,700 | (13.01%) ¥575,000 |
| Flat levies (per-person + household) | ¥83,900 | ¥84,800 |
| Total kokuho bill | ¥376,700 | ¥659,800 |
| As % of average income | 13.6% | 13.6% |
Interesting. The numbers converge in different ways to make kokuho tax the same % of income. Big caveat: in the real world, not the statistically averaged one, the tidy sameness collapses. Kamogawa’s tax is regressive; it leans heavily on flat fees. Tokyo’s is progressive; they take in more money through the percentage of income because salaries are higher.
Answering my question, “Does Kamogawa charge more tax than other places?” I think the answer is “No, but it depends.” Kamogawa’s resident and fixed asset taxes are exactly standard. Kokuho tax is high, but it’s not the highest regionally, nationally, or in comparison to Tokyo averages. However, if you are a solo elderly person on a fixed income, kokuho taxes are going to feel burdensome due to the heavy flat fees.
The answer is, as usual, a matter of perspective.
