Nobuko Kobayashi co-leads the Japan consumer practice of global strategy consulting group EY-Parthenon.
Rarely can a national tax scheme celebrate mass popularity. But Japan's "hometown tax" program, introduced in 2008, is one such example. A creative measure to funnel individual income taxes from tax-rich cities to financially struggling rural areas, the hometown tax program -- furusato nozei in Japanese -- grew from an aggregate 8.14 billion yen (about $53 million) in 2008 to 1.117 trillion yen (about $7.3 billion) in 2023.
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