TLUG Mailing List

On Thu, 13 Mar 2025, 15:34 Stephen J. Turnbull, <turnbull@example.com> wrote:

Nikolay Elenkov writes:

> There is a simple workaround: install your mynumber certificate on
> your phone. [...] You can use the Web UI and use a QR code to
> login, submit, and authenticate when needed.

Unfortunately for some purposes I need to use the native e-Tax
software, which only exists on Windows. I will check to see if login
via QR code is suppored there.

> On Thu, Mar 13, 2025 at 12:36?AM Stephen J. Turnbull
> <turnbull@example.com> wrote:
> >
> > Christian Horn writes:
> >
> > > It's my 8th year in Japan. I need to extra declare RSU/stock which
> > > I get from the employer - I can compute that by now myself, but
> > > still entering seems like such a hard endavour that I visit the
> > > tax consult place every year.
> >
> > Once I got the environment fixed up, I found filling the web forms to
> > not be too bad, but finding stuff it really hard (I think the NTA
> > hired the authors of Zork!), and the PDF and Excel forms are
> > gawd-awful, and butt-ugly even in Adobe on a Mac. Not to mention the
> > damn popups everywhere.
> >
> > > Depending on the time of the day it takes 1-3 hours.
> >
> > It's a 30-45 minute drive one way for me, so I can easily kill a day
> > that way. There's also the small matter of being self-employed I can
> > get a 100,000 to 650,000 deduction from income, but I must do it
> > with e-Tax to get the big number. If I actually make that much
> > (doubtful but not impossible), that's in the neighborhood of 100,000
> > savings on taxes. That buys a lot of rice and beer and approval from
> > uchi-no-ookura-daijin, even with the insane inflation in rice prices!
> >
> > > This year, also the staff there was not able to do etax with an
> > > iPhone,
> >
> > Interesting. I did the first form which I knew exactly where it was
> > with an iPhone. After that the problem is that the site is hard
> > enough to navigate and I kept getting bounced out to public pages, and
> > every time I'd return to the work I'd have to log in again. With a
> > Mac I could open in a new tab and preserve the logged-in tabs.
> >
> > > FWIW, application for HAM radio callsighn could be done from
> > > Firefox/Linux, even though the site complained about unsupported
> > > environment.
> >
> > Yeah, I don't know why so many Japanese programmers have such a hard
> > time just conforming to open standards, but that's been true as long
> > as I've been here. They'd rather conform to some BigCorp's
> > proprietary stuff.
>

With regards Japanese use of corporate...

its a change in mindset from "*I* will do this..." over to "everyone uses... " and the results of years of sales pitching from corporates to other corporates where the programming happens.

Open-Source has to gain traction in an area where corporates demand corporate support or equal capability which *few*(if any?) open source projects even have the volunteers for.

I've applied to programming projects here in Japan and even looking in bookstores...

I get the impression of marketing overrunning open source with regards the promises made for whqt a system can do.

Hell... the IT systems where I work is all outsourced to fujitsu or another Japanese corporation.

the Workstations in use are only having the migration from XP to Windows 7 *started* this year.

Ive seen Windows XP, Windows 2008 Server and Windows 7.

and the Applications are all "in house" exclusive use only.

as for Open Source... Android devices only atarted coming into use for the *internal* logistics network.

Previously working as an English Teacher for some Japanese programmers... a lot of them were straight out of school and expected to learn corporate development with open source awareness being extremely low for the junior positions.

I have not seen any OpenSource anything in any of the High Schools I taught at either...

unless I installed the Workstation myself ans gave the students a login to experiment with it.

Re: [tlug] e-Tax and the timid gaijin