[tlug] e-Tax and the timid gaijin

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Hi

I don't know if either the locale issue or the "your environment
stinks" issue described below affects filing "kakutei-shinkoku", but
given the season I thought I'd describe my experience.

When trying to access some forms to set up a business, e-Tax refused
to display some critical menus because my locale was not ja_JP.  (I
don't think the encoding matters, but I've only tried UTF-8 because
I'm on Mac/Safari.)  e-Tax was zero help diagnosing this, the clue was
HTTP 404 statuses in the Javascript console for documents with "en-us"
in the URL.

I also found that it's not easy to use a cheap IC card reader (Sofun
IC609, USB A and C, 1400 with coupon on Amazon, no driver
installation required).  It seems to be working now, but that required
installing and configuring three separate Safari extensions and
related applications[2] (of which only JPKI can be actually invoked
from the Applications menu), and rebooting.  e-Tax was zero help -- it
just refused to allow me to do anything once logged in (which required
access to the card, my head hurts!) because "your card reader may not
sign documents properly".  (This was resolved when I still had the
en_US locale configured, seems to be indpendent of that issue.)

My ancient iPhone 12 OTOH worked immediately, but it's so painful to
navigate (Japanese) (government) sites in that format....

At least the JPKI app seems to be quite competently done. Very scary
if not, eh?

Footnotes: 
[2]  MyNumber, JPKI (Japan Public Key Infrastructure), e-Tax.