In an unusual YouTube anime, the aggrieved creative Chiho Okura attempts to explain Japan’s consumption tax to freelancers. Her 15-minute Invoice School series features a bunch of animals, including a gorilla greengrocer who’s ploughing on through it, and a snake who is giving up a career in illustration because he just can’t be arsed any more.

British readers will be entirely unphased by the idea of a “Value Added Tax” – because VAT is basically what we are talking about here – an actual alien turns up partway to point this out to the other animals. But in Japan it was only introduced in 1989, at a piddly little rate of just 3%. It got hiked in 1997 to 5%. In the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake, a government in search of more money racked it up to 8%. Facing the costs of the Olympics and a declining population of income tax payers, Shinzo Abe turned the thumbscrews yet again in 2019, raising it to 10% for many items – I was actually on a ship touring Japan at the time, and the passengers were advised to buy their objets d’art immediately, and not the following day when everything would literally cost more.

The 1st October 2023 saw a new twist in Japan’s tax law, shunting a bunch of the burdens for freelancers on the person who writes the invoice. I don’t pretend to understand a lot of this, because I have never earned enough money to have to pay British VAT [Sorry – Ed.], but I get the impression that it is a massive faff for anyone who has to do it, and entrepreneurs end up having to set aside multiple days each month to collect tax on the government’s behalf.

Okura and her collaborators, Spinnauts and the character designer Nonoa, are clearly distressed about a new avalanche of paperwork that will only make it harder for them to do their jobs. A very enthusiastic rabbit tells the other animals that everything will be just fine, but it’s plain to see that Okura’s sympathies lie with the dejected illustrator-snake, who frets his customers will refuse to pay the extra money on his invoice, and pass the expense on to him instead. It seems like twisting the knife to point out that in the anime business, he’s unlikely to ever earn the £54,000 that would oblige him to complete the paperwork.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #236, 2023.