Japan Press Weekly

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2013 March 13 - 19 [ECONOMY]

People stage demonstrations opposing consumption tax hike

Many people on March 13 rose up across the country in protest against a consumption tax increase scheduled for April of next year and the Abe administration’s economic measures, the so-called “Abenomics,” which gives top priority to financial circles.

At this time every year, during the period of filing income-tax returns, self-employed people, workers, and farmers jointly take actions against heavy taxation policies. This year, 550 actions took place nationwide with a total of 135,000 people taking part.

Representatives of 23 organizations in a national action committee held a meeting in the Lower House building. A delegation of the Tokyo Construction Workers Union (Tokyo Doken) said, “Construction workers’ wages have been declining due to cuts in the amount of orders and in unit prices. We cannot bear any more tax burdens.”

Tokyo University Professor Emeritus Daigo Satoshi said in his speech that it is essential to make large corporations use a part of their enormously accumulated internal reserves to raise workers’ wages, and to redistribute wealth from the rich to the rest through increasing income and inheritance taxes on high-income earners.

On the same day in Osaka, 16,000 citizens joined actions in 44 locations in the prefecture. A tofu maker in Sakai City said, “My income has dropped to one-third of what it was in the last several years. Many of my customers are elderly who are living a hard life due to consecutive pension cuts. The government should work for a wage hike and increase benefits instead of raising the consumption tax rate.”

A participant in a demonstration in Togane City, Chiba Prefecture, has operated a pig farm for 35 years. “It’s been getting harder for us to pay the sales tax because of a jump in the price of imported feed, an increase in imported pork, and the prolonged weak domestic consumer spending. I’m worried that the consumption tax hike may cause quite a few pig breeders to go under,” he said.