March 26, 2013

Japanese Communist Party parliamentarian Yamashita Yoshiki urged the government to provide a deduction on taxable income for all single mothers regardless of whether they used to be married or not at an Upper House committee meeting on general affairs on March 25.

The special tax deduction is currently given to mothers who divorced their husbands or whose husbands passed away, but it is not applied to single mothers who have never married.

Yamashita introduced a case of a mother-child household in Okinawa who lives on two million yen a year. The mother has to pay 310,000 yen more annually than those who can get the tax credit. “Just because they don’t have a marriage record, mother-child households have to suffer discrimination and have more serious financial difficulties,” said Yamashita.

In order to prevent financial disparities among parents from affecting their children, Okayama, Chiba, and Sapporo cities have reduced the fees for childcare facilities for mother-child households without marriage records. The JCP representative demanded that the national government take steps to treat all mother-child households equally in taxation.