THIS MONTH AT THE TAX OFFICE (principal items only)
- Income tax — estimated prepayment. Application to reduce the amount due: July 15.
- Property tax (and city-planning tax), second installment. Payment due on the date set by municipalordinance.
- Corporations with a May fiscal year-end. Final returns for corporate tax and consumption tax.
- Corporations with a November fiscal year-end. Interim returns for corporate tax and consumptiontax.
Don’t be alarmed by an envelope marked “Regional Taxation Bureau 国税局” — a word on the new Operations Centers.
For national taxes — corporate tax, income tax, and the like — the local tax office税務署 has long been your point of contact. To streamline administration, those windows are now being consolidated. Beginning on the 10th of this month, within Ehime Prefecture the Matsuyama and Iyo-Saijō tax offices will be served by the Matsuyama Branch of the Takamatsu Regional Taxation Bureau Operations Center, and the remaining areas by the Operations Center itself. As a result, letters will now arrive under the name “Takamatsu Regional Taxation Bureau Operations Center 高松国税局業務センター.” Only the point of contact has changed; the office with jurisdiction over your filings is exactly as before. Should you wish to consult a tax office in person, please note that an appointment may now be required.
The Yen Touches 162, a Number Last Seen 39 Years Ago. The River Has Not Stopped.
An 800-year-old meditation on impermanence still has something to tell anyone who watches a market — or closes a set of books.
The New Year, it seems, was only the other day, and already we have crossed into July —
half of 2026 is gone. We say such stretches slip past “in the blink of an eye あっという間,”
yet nothing leapt from January to July. Every second of those six months was lived through, counted out one by one, by every person alive. That, precisely, is what the old
word mujō 無常 — impermanence — was meant to describe.
Eight centuries ago, the recluse Kamo no Chōmei opened his Hōjōki with an image no reader here ever quite forgets. The river flows on and never ceases, he wrote, and yet the water is never the same water. Where the current slows, foam gathers on the surface — now vanishing, now forming — and never for long does it hold. The people of this world,
and the houses they live in, are no different.
Mujō means, simply, “not constant”: that all things change without pause and hold no single state forever. Put so plainly, it is obvious. What is not obvious — and what matters — is how one chooses to feel it.
This is no Japanese monopoly. The philosophers of Greece and Rome circled the same truth; in India and China, the lands that gave Buddhism its headwaters, impermanence was treated as a fact to be grasped on the way out of human suffering. What Japan did with it was particular. It turned the recognition into an aesthetic — into ephemerality, into poignancy, into beauty. Here the passing of time is not merely mourned. A thing is beautiful because it changes; it is savored because it is never complete.
I did not expect to meet Chōmei’s river on a foreign-exchange screen, and yet there it was. Yesterday, on the last day of June, the yen slipped to 162 against the dollar — a level not seen in thirty-nine and a half years. Set the two numbers side by side, the 162 of then and the 162 of now, and consider the distance between them.
In that gap lie a bubble, its bursting, and the thirty lost years that came after. Everyone
reading this — those whose work brushes against the exchange rate and those whose work seems to have nothing to do with it — has lived an entire life across that span. Like the river, money flows alongside a life and never stays still. 162 is today’s value; what
tomorrow will make of it, no one can say.
Currencies, equities, bonds — each is decided in an instant, and each instant’s judgment is followed at once by the demand for the next. Business is no different. The moment one fiscal year closes, the next has already begun. The books I help my clients settle are themselves a kind of foam: formed, dissolved, formed again.
Can we feel the ephemerality in that? Can we feel the beauty? Beauty, perhaps, is asking too much. But the ephemerality — the sense of a life moving through these numbers — that, I think, we can feel. And to feel it, even standing on the floor of a falling market, may be a quiet consolation of its own.
