TOKYO -- Big American tech companies that had maneuvered to reduce their tax exposure in Japan are changing course amid mounting criticism worldwide that they are not shouldering their fair share of the burden.
Amazon.com's Japanese subsidiaries paid about 15 billion yen ($137 million) in corporate taxes in each of the years ending December 2017 and 2018, according to an insider. This marks a more than 10-fold surge from 2014 -- when two units together paid 1.1 billion yen -- compared with an increase of only 75% in Amazon's Japanese sales over that period to $13.8 billion in 2018. The news was first reported by Kyodo News.
