Life in Japan: Income and Resident Taxes, NHI

This morning I head out to the local city hall to get signed up for National Health Insurance, which is the standard health plan here in Japan.

Before I do, if you plan to stay in Japan for a year or longer, here are some bills headed your way that it's best to save up for little by little so you don't fall out of your chair when you get them.

Resident Tax: Resident tax, around 10% of your income, doesn't kick in until you've been in Japan an entire year as of January 1st. So this year I'm off the hook, because as of January 1st, 2013 I'll only have been here around 5 months. However, on January 1st, 2014, I'll start to owe tax. You'll get your bill mailed to you in the spring or summer, as I'm hearing different months from different people, and it's normally broken down so that you can pay it off in four payments over one year.

National Health Insurance: For the first year, it's pretty cheap (I'll update this price after I go today if it's different), around $20-30 USD per month. This is because your monthly premium is determined based on your previous year's salary in Japan. So your second year it's going to shoot up to about 8% of your first year's income. At some point, I'll do another post at some point with more details on NHI.

Income Tax: Check with your employer. Most handle this for you before you get your paycheck, but a few don't, I've heard. If they don't you will be responsible for filing your own taxes.

Learn to Read Japanese: Firefox Furigana Add-Ons

If you’re a student of Japanese and have gotten into hiragana and kanji, you’re probably familiar with “furigana”. “Furigana” is the name for the tiny hiragana (alphabet) written above or to the right of a kanji to show how it's pronounced, which can vary depending on several factors. 

(Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Seen mostly in children’s books to help the little guys along, or for adults when a rare kanji is used, furigana are also found in textbooks for learners of Japanese. But what if you could add furigana above kanji in online text, any text, turning any Web page into an instant learning opportunity?

It sounds too good to be true, but as I learned today there are Firefox add-ons for just that. :D Here are two:

Furigana Inserter

Ahahahahhaa… oh dear God, I spent over an hour trying to get this to work, with the teasing promise of “furigana anywhere online” driving me on. Remember the old “The princess is in another castle?” video game line? Imagine an add-on like that.

“Download this… and this… and this… oh, and this thing you’ll need to download to open the third thing, and oh yeah, you’ll need to have a special program to run this one, and another program to get the first special program to run, and I hope you're a coder because we're doing shell commands…”

The only reason I’m even mentioning this one is because I’m on a Mac and perhaps the install is easier on other platforms. No tips because I couldn't get it installed.

Furigana Injector

So, beaten, buried under downloads, and about to give up, I remembered that somewhere someone had mentioned a different add-on, this one called “Furigana Injector”.

I went. I clicked. I followed directions. All in all, three minutes later I had this beautiful Web page to look at!

This is an article about the World Cosplay Summit going on now in Nagoya, if you're curious. :)

Tips for Injector: When you install, it lets you set the level of kanji you want to ignore and not put furigana over. The lowest level leaves out the easiest 100 kanji.

However, if you'd like all kanji with furigana, you can change that once it installs. Open Firefox, go to Tools, Add-Ons, and then click the Preferences button for Furigana Injector. Erase all the kanji in the text box and then close the box.

On another note, the installation instructions say a little 振 icon will appear in your status bar, but I don't have one. Instead I go to the section of the webpage I want, right click, select "Inject" from the  振 dropdown menu, and give it a second. The "Inject Whole Page" option doesn't work for me, but I've read from other users that it may just be slow depending on what page you're on.

Injector doesn't play nice with the awesome dictionary app Rikaichan, meaning you won't be able to mouse over with Rikaichan after you've added furigana. Rikaichan will also tell you pronunications when you mouse over words, but I prefer the all-at-once "textbook" presentation of Injector, and will probably just do a run-through with Rikaichan for words I don't know before adding Injector to help me read through an article.

So it's not a perfect fit for a Mac, but considering what it does and that it does it for free, I'm quite happy with it. :D

Have you had experience with either of these add-ons or a different one? Let me know what you think of them.