Learning from Japanese taxation and subway systems

Kyoto, Japan — The wonders never cease, despite coming here in this ancient Japanese city a number of times already over the past decade.

This industrial powerhouse of a country that once lay prone after two atomic bombs were dropped barely 71 years ago may yet provide the answer to jitters among anti-federalists in the Philippines.

Among the most contentious arguments made by naysayers is that a federated Philippines may result in uneven development, where highly urbanized and economically progressive cities within a federal state (e.g. Cebu or Davao) will become magnets for migrants from poorer states like those in the Samar-Leyte region, for example, to look for work and pay their taxes there.

As a result increased taxes, so the argument goes, would further increase the economic power of already rich cities.

Well, a casual conversation over lunch here with Dr. Kiyoko Yamaguchi, an architect with a doctorate in architectural history from Kyoto University, turned very intriguing when she told me that Japanese taxation system allows individual taxpayers to decide which town or city their tax will go to!

Kiyoko — whose dissertation on Cebu’s ancestral houses in the American colonial period will be published soon by the University of San Carlos Press — told me that there is actually even a handbook published annually detailing all the towns and cities in every prefecture (province to us) in Japan that the taxpayer can choose from.

The purpose of the handbook is to give the taxpayer some idea of where his or her taxes go and what kind of returns, in the form of gifts, the town council sends to the individual taxpayer in gratitude. She told me that some towns even send rice and expensive wagyo beef to the taxpayer in return. (We probably call this a bribe but one has to understand the concept of gift-giving among the Japanese to see that it actually is not seen that way here.)

Kyoto City does not give gifts, however. Still Kiyoko persists on paying her taxes to the city because she has no time to fill out documents informing the government where her tax should go.
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The World Archaeological Congress (WAC), a meeting held once every four or five years by nearly two thousand archaeologists from all over the world, opened here in Kyoto last Sunday, the eighth congress ever to be called and the second time in Japan (the sixth was held in Osaka in 2006). This has given me, thanks to the University of San Carlos, the opportunity to spend longer time than before in this ancient city.

If there is one thing I use here that I would be extremely happy to also use in Cebu, it would be the development of a subway transit system running the length of the urban metropolis of Cebu, preferably using Japanese technology and equipment.

There are two huge and wide rivers here in Kyoto, the Kamo and the Katsura, which often rise to flood levels. And, being in Japan, the city has its share of earthquakes. Still the city, like those of other progressive cities anywhere in the world, relies on its efficient subway system, with squeaky-clean terminals — some with commercial establishments — that go 20-30 meters down the city.

It will be costly at the start to dig and put in place such a subway, but the fact that they have survived and been continuously used in, say Paris or London since the late 1800s, and even served as bomb shelters during times of war, shows that the cost of this type of mass transit system can be spread over decades. Kyoto itself has just two lines, built in 1981, one running north to south and the other east to west, covering something like 30 kilometers. According to statistics, 310,000 passengers are served daily by these two lines, with stations that connect to different buses that run other lateral routes.

The high cost for buying private properties that will be used for an aboveground line running from Liloan straight to Minglanilla will most probably match the cost of building a subway which can be dug beneath the National Highway (and N. Bacalso Avenue) and then come out aboveground thereafter to run further north and south.

There will be massive traffic while the construction is done. But a little sacrifice to end our dependence on a moribund transport system of jeepneys, tricycles and multicabs best displayed in the museum, is well worth it. One need not look further than Manila and see why Metro Cebu needs to do this now.

Or we can continue to be left behind by the progressive world that runs on the backbone of an underground mass transit system that wipes out traffic above ground, helps save the environment, and conveys people promptly in time to their work free of stress, sweat and searing frustration.