The Money Cometh

I got some good mail today. A bunch of paperwork to claim my unpaid wages from Japan. I shall endeavor to have them sent back by the end of the week. Registered post. After making photocopies.

While this in general is good news, it isn't all great. The total unpaid wages are 430366 yen. Since it's a payment from the government for unpaid wages, they're only going to give me 80%. So that means 344292 yen (the bastards round a 0.8 yen down). Next is the bit I wasn't counting on. Since I'm no longer a resident of Japan (maybe) I have to pay 20% income tax. This is a bit shit since while I was there I only had to pay about 3-5% (I can't remember exactly, but it was a lot less than 20%). This brings the figure down to 275434.24 yen (I'm sure they'll round that down as well).

One thing I'm not sure of is if I still count as being a resident of Japan for the moment. My residency visa is still valid, and I never sort of went to city hall to inform them I'd be leaving Japan (I think I was meant to hand in my alien card if I did so, and I wanted to keep it as a souvenir, so I didn't).

I also have to decide where to send the money. The easiest is to just have them put the money in my Japanese bank account. They've already filled out the forms for this. I didn't close the bank account kind of for this reason. This of course means I'd have to make a trip back to Japan at some time. If I did this I think their chances of not charging me the income tax are slightly better, but not so good because someone knows I'm not living in Japan anymore (namely the people who sent me the documents). The other two options are to have the money sent here, or have it sent to Australia. Having it sent to Australia would probably be better, since no matter what, I'll be sending a lot of the money home to save (I've kind of already mentally written off the money, so anything I do get is kind of like money for nothing now). I'll probably use some of it to buy a digital camera over here (my korean phone is an ok camera, but the way it names photos is annoying. noname.jpg, then noname(1).jpg, etc, etc. and the bluetooth file transfer does not preserve the file creation data. This makes automatic renaming into my prefered photo filename format (yyyymmddnn.jpg, y - year, m - month, d - date, n - photo number for that day) quite frustrating. My japanese phone was much better in that regard). If I do go back to Japan, it would probably just be for an overnight trip one weekend and I think I'd just stay out all night rather than get a hostel room.

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Writing time: 25 minutes
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