Tax Office Jitters

...Continued from previous post.

The Shinjuku Ward tax office was a nondescript building in a nondescript section of Shinjuku, just beyond the shadows of the district’s celebrated skyscrapers. At first I walked right by, mistaking the four-story structure set back from the road for a school – a class of building molded from a similar concrete cookie-cutter batch.

Inside, the room of bureaucrats silently shuffled papers at retro metal desks under light fixtures yellowed with age. Lines snaked on the worn salmon carpet as people waited to turn in forms I didn’t have and couldn’t read.

Not sure of where to start, I walked up to an unstaffed counter. My strategy for assistance was one of entrapment. Looking helpless becomes an advantage when playing upon the innate sensibilities of the Japanese to deliver superior customer service no matter who the client.

I set myself as bait, standing tall and vigilant. One glance and Hiroshi was hooked. Our eyes met. I reeled him in with a smile and wave of papers (actually just the map the Oracle had circled).

Short spiky hair and acne-scarred cheeks gave him a fresh out of school look. Hiroshi was easily the most junior on the graying staff, and as a result was probably under 9-to-5 orders to serve whoever the wind blew in, such as clueless gaijin like myself.

Even though we couldn’t communicate, he dutifully ushered me to a long table with a wood pattern laminate peeling from the corners. I had seen this before. I flashed back to elementary school lunch tables on which I unwrapped the tinfoil around a PB&J sandwich my mother packed with two Saran-wrapped Oreos and a napkin inside a brown paper bag.

Instead of taking out my lunch, I handed Hiroshi the earnings slip that prompted the Oracle to steer me here. Turning in the paper was like loading batteries into a robot. Hiroshi sprung into action, picking up a form that looked like an accountant’s crossword puzzle. He plugged numbers into formulas, tapped on a calculator and juggled the results into rows of white boxes.

“Maybe you owe money!” echoed the Oracle’s haunting forecast.

That outcome worried me. Here I was going out of my way to do the right thing, and I prayed to be rewarded with a tax payout, not punished with penalty for a balance due. I watched Hiroshi’s tabulations with the fixation of a tennis line judge. Refund, refund, refund, I chanted to myself, holding my breath for the sum to settle. Totals climbed with additions and tumbled with subtractions. I felt like I was on some kind of personal finances game show hanging on to see which way the balance would tip.

¥26,820. Hiroshi put his pen down. Positive or negative? I sought clarification in his eyes, but he directed them towards his senior who had appeared behind him to supervise the calculations and translate the result into English.

“This number is your refund,” the man said of my approximately $240 windfall.

I exhaled. In my next breath I naively asked for my winnings in cash, drawing laughter from both employees. A casino this was not.

As I scribbled my bank account information on a deposit form, another sheet of paper appeared. It was a letter – in English and addressed to someone else. Apparently I had to do some off-the-books work to secure my money. No matter what a foreigner’s occupation in Japan, no one is immune from at least some degree of teaching English. Spontaneous tutoring arises without warning and in unusual places, like here at the local tax office. I ignored irregular capitalization as I proofread the letter about a foreigner’s double filing mistake. When I, too, rested my pen, we traded bowing thanks over the long table.

Outside the rain had stopped, and the pavement gleamed under thinning clouds. On my way home I decided to stop by the Oracle to share news of my good fortune.