Japan's gift tax for foreigners: you are taxed for receiving, and half the rules sit in another act

The person receiving is the one taxed

Japan's gift tax — zoyo zei (贈与税) — does not live in an act of its own. It sits inside the Inheritance Tax Act, which is the first thing that makes it hard to look up: searching for a gift tax act in Japanese law returns nothing, because there is not one.

Article 1-4(1) opens by naming who owes the tax, and it names the recipient. Everything in the article is written from the point of view of a person who acquired property by gift — where they lived when they acquired it, how long they have been in Japan, what nationality they hold. Art.21 says the same thing from the other end: the tax is charged as an amount 贈与により財産を取得した者に係る贈与税額 — pertaining to the person who acquired the property. Compare 26 U.S.C. §2502(c), which is one sentence long: “The tax imposed by section 2501 shall be paid by the donor.” The United States puts the charge on the person giving; Japan puts it on the person receiving. If you are carrying an assumption over from another country, that is the one to check first.

The second structural point is that the unit of assessment is the calendar year and the recipient, not the gift and not the pair of people. Two grandparents and an uncle each sending money in the same year produce one taxable amount for one person, with one deduction against it. This is why the calculator asks for a year's total rather than for a gift.

Four categories, and what each one reaches

Art.1-4(1) sorts recipients into four categories, and Art.2-2 then says in two sentences what each category is taxed on. Categories (i) and (ii) are taxed on everything they receive, wherever in the world it is. Categories (iii) and (iv) are taxed only on what they receive that is located in Japan.

Two Japanese words carry the structure. The first is jusho (住所) — roughly, the place where a person's life is centred. It is not a visa and not the address printed on a card. The second is zairyu shikaku (在留資格), a status of residence: the permission to be in Japan and to do a particular thing here. A visa in the strict sense is the sticker a consulate issues before you travel, and it is not what any of this turns on.

Read the table in the order the statute does. You are in (i) or (ii) unless a carve-out pushes you out; the carve-outs all describe the donor, and they all do the same work — they let a temporary resident, or a person outside Japan, escape worldwide scope when the person giving is also foreign or also outside Japan. Property physically in Japan never escapes: whoever gives it and whoever takes it, it is caught by (i), (ii), (iii) or (iv).

The definition that is not in the gift tax article

Everything above turns on ichiji kyojusha (一時居住者), a temporary resident. Art.1-4(3)(i) defines it, and on its face the definition is open:

A person holding a status of residence, whose periods of jusho in Japan total ten years or less within the fifteen years before the gift. Nothing there restricts which status of residence counts — which would mean a permanent resident could be a temporary resident for this tax, and could therefore be pushed out of worldwide scope by a foreign donor.

That reading is wrong, and the reason it is wrong is not in Art.1-4 at all. The term is defined one article earlier, in the inheritance-tax provision, and that definition reaches forward:

The other two defined terms follow the same shape. An gaikokujin zoyosha (外国人贈与者) is a donor who, at the time of the gift, held a status of residence and had a jusho in Japan — with no limit at all on how long they had been here. A hikyoju zoyosha (非居住贈与者) is a donor with no jusho in Japan at the time, who either had one within the previous ten years but held no Japanese nationality at any of those times, or had none in those ten years at all.

The ¥1.1 million is not in the Gift Tax provisions either

The annual allowance is where the calculation starts — Art.21-7 applies the rates to what is left after it. Open the article that sets it and you will find a different number.

Six hundred thousand yen. The figure that applies is an override in a different act — the Special Taxation Measures Act:

The same manoeuvre is performed twice. The settlement system discussed below has its own annual deduction, stated in Art.21-11-2 of the Inheritance Tax Act as ¥600,000 and overridden to ¥1,100,000 by Art.70-3-2 of the Special Taxation Measures Act for gifts from 1 January 2024. If you check a Japanese tax figure against the Inheritance Tax Act alone, you will get the wrong answer twice in this subject.

One consequence worth stating plainly: the deduction belongs to the person receiving, once per year. It is not per donor. Art.21-5 takes it off the kazei kakaku (課税価格) — the taxable amount — which is built from the whole of what that person received by gift during the year.

Two rate tables, and how the statute builds them

There are two tables. The general one is Art.21-7 of the Inheritance Tax Act. The special one is Art.70-2-5(1) of the Special Taxation Measures Act, and it applies to property received from a chokkei sonzoku (直系尊属) — a lineal ascendant, meaning a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent, and not a parent-in-law, an aunt or an uncle.

The tables are read band by band, not as a single rate on the whole amount. Art.21-7 says so in terms — the base is divided into the listed amounts, each is multiplied by its rate, and the results are added. There is a shorter way to reach the same figure, in which a single rate is applied to the whole base and a fixed amount is then subtracted. We checked the two methods against each other at every ¥1,000 step from ¥1,000 to ¥120,000,000, on both tables, and they agree throughout. The calculator on this site sums the bands the way the article describes, and shows the working.

Two roundings apply, and they are in a third act. Art.118(1) of the Act on General Rules for National Taxes rounds the taxable base down to a whole ¥1,000 — and to zero if the whole of it is under ¥1,000. Art.119(1) rounds the finished tax down to a whole ¥100. Receiving ¥1,100,999 in a year therefore produces no tax, and not because of the allowance alone.

Receiving from both sides in one year blends the tables

This is the part that a printed rate table cannot express. It arises whenever one calendar year contains both kinds — a parent putting money towards a deposit, and a sibling, a friend or a parent-in-law giving something in the same year.

Art.70-2-5(3) does not let you apply the better table to the whole amount, and it does not split the ¥1.1 million between the two kinds. It computes the entire taxable base twice — once under the special table, once under the general table — and then takes each result in the proportion that that kind of property bears to the year's total.

Worked through: receive ¥4,000,000 from a parent and ¥4,000,000 from a friend in the same year, and the taxable base is ¥6,900,000 after the single deduction. The whole ¥6,900,000 through the special table is ¥1,170,000; through the general table it is ¥1,510,000. Each is taken at 50%, because each kind is half the year's total, giving ¥585,000 and ¥755,000 — ¥1,340,000 in all. Neither table alone gives that figure.

The special table also has to be claimed. Art.70-2-5(4) applies it only where the return says it is being relied on and carries the prescribed schedule. It is a relief you ask for, not a rate that is applied to you.

Money from your parents for rent and school is not in the tax base

If money arrives from family abroad, it may not be a gift in the sense the tax means at all. Art.21-3(1) lists property whose value is never brought into the taxable amount at all — it is not an exemption applied after the deduction, it is an exclusion from the base.

Three limits sit in that sentence, and all three have to hold. The transfer has to be between people who owe each other a duty of support. It has to be for living costs or education. And it has to be within what is regarded as ordinarily necessary — 通常必要と認められるもの.

The first limit is defined by statute, and it reaches outside the household. Art.1-2(i) reads fuyo gimusha (扶養義務者) as the spouse plus the relatives on whom Art.877 of the Civil Code places a duty of support, and lineal blood relatives are within that class. Your parents are your 扶養義務者 whether they live in Osaka or in Ohio; the tax definition says nothing about where they are.

The third limit is the one that does the work, and it is not in the statute. There is no figure in Art.21-3, and no cabinet order or ministerial ordinance fills it in — the delegations under Art.21-3 run to items (iii) and (v), not to item (ii). The test lives in the National Tax Agency's circular on the act, which is an instruction to tax officials rather than law, and which is where this provision acquires the condition that catches people out.

The circular also tells you what the two words cover. Living costs (21-3-3) are the costs of ordinary daily life, excluding education, and it treats medical costs and the costs of raising a child as included. Education costs (21-3-4) are school fees, teaching materials and stationery that are ordinarily necessary for the person's education, and it notes they are not confined to compulsory education. For the ceiling, 21-3-6 offers a standard rather than a number: 被扶養者の需要と扶養者の資力その他一切の事情を勘案して社会通念上適当と認められる範囲 — the range regarded as socially appropriate, weighing the recipient's needs against the supporter's means and all other circumstances. There is no figure anywhere, and we have not invented one.

Money crossing the border is reported by the bank

One related fact, which is simply a matter of record. Under Art.4(1) of the act on securing proper taxation in relation to overseas remittances, a financial institution that carries out an overseas remittance or the receipt of one from overseas for a customer must file a statement with the tax office by the end of the month following. Art.8(1) of its cabinet order sets the amount below which no statement is required at ¥1,000,000. The obligation is the bank's, not yours, and it applies to receiving as well as sending.

We mention it because it bears on record-keeping, not because it changes what is taxable: a transfer being reported does not make it a gift, and a transfer not being reported does not stop it being one. Keeping evidence of what money was for, and of it being applied to what it was for, is what the circular above makes relevant.

¥20 million between spouses, and the clawback it survives

Art.21-6(1) allows ¥20,000,000 against the taxable amount where a person receives from a spouse of twenty years or more either residential land or a dwelling located in Japan, or money used to buy one. The property has to be occupied by 15 March of the following year, with the intention of continuing to live there. It can be taken once between the same two people — the article excludes a person who took it for a gift from that spouse in an earlier year.

It is conditional on filing. Art.21-6(2) applies it only where the return carries the amount claimed, a statement that the relief was not taken in an earlier year, and the prescribed documents. Art.21-6(3) lets the tax office accept a document supplied late where there was an unavoidable reason for its absence, but the relief is not applied to you automatically in any case.

It also survives something. The seven-year add-back described below pulls gifts from the deceased back into the inheritance tax base — but Art.19(1) excludes tokutei zoyo zaisan (特定贈与財産), defined in Art.19(2) as the portion covered by this spouse deduction. A qualifying transfer between spouses does not come back on the first death.

The home-purchase exemption is closed to two of the four categories

Art.70-2 of the Special Taxation Measures Act excludes from the taxable amount money received from a lineal ascendant and put towards building or buying a home — ¥10,000,000 where the home meets one of the listed energy-efficiency, earthquake-resistance or accessibility requirements, and ¥5,000,000 otherwise. The whole sum has to be applied to the home, and the home occupied, by 15 March of the following year.

One date deserves emphasis because it is close. Art.70-2(1) frames the relief by a window — 令和六年一月一日から令和八年十二月三十一日までの間, 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2026. As the article stands on 11 August 2026, that is where it ends. Reliefs of this kind have been extended repeatedly in the past, and we are not predicting whether this one will be; we are saying that the text in force today stops at the end of this year, and that anyone counting on it for a purchase completing in 2027 should check the position rather than assume it.

If you are working through the cost of the purchase itself, the property tax guide covers the taxes that follow ownership, and the purchase-cost calculator covers the one-off taxes on the transaction.

The election you cannot take back

Beside the annual system there is a second one: sozoku ji seisan kazei (相続時精算課税), settlement of the tax at the time of inheritance. Art.21-9(1) opens it where the recipient is a presumptive heir who is a lineal descendant of the donor and was eighteen or older on 1 January of the year, and the donor was sixty or older on the same day. Gifts from that donor then sit outside the annual system and are settled against inheritance tax when the donor dies.

Since 1 January 2024 it has carried its own annual deduction of ¥1,100,000, by the Art.70-3-2 override described earlier. That deduction is per donor who has been elected into the system, and it is separate from the annual system's allowance.

The feature to understand before electing is in Art.21-9(6), and the article is one sentence long:

The notification cannot be withdrawn. It is made per donor, so electing for one parent leaves the other parent on the annual system, but for the donor it names the choice is permanent — Art.21-9(5) keeps it running for that donor even if the recipient later stops being a presumptive heir. This is the provision most worth taking to a professional before, rather than after.

The seven-year add-back is still being read as three

Gift tax and inheritance tax are not sealed off from each other. Art.19 is headed 相続開始前七年以内に贈与があつた場合の相続税額 and brings gifts made by the deceased in the seven years before the death back into the inheritance tax base for a person who inherits. Gift tax already paid on that property is credited, so it is not taxed twice, but the effect is to pull it up into the inheritance-tax rates.

The seven-year period is not uniform. Art.19(1) provides in a parenthetical that for the part of the added-back property acquired otherwise than within three years of the death, the total is reduced by ¥1,000,000. That is one million yen against the whole of years four to seven taken together — not one million per year. The most recent three years come back in full.

The seven years then phase in rather than switching on, and the reason is in Art.19(1) of the same transitional provisions: the new Art.19(1) applies to property acquired by gift on or after 1 January 2024, and gifts before that date stay under the former rules. So a death in, say, 2028 reaches back to the start of 2024 rather than a full seven years, and the window lengthens by a year each year until it is complete. Working that forward from 1 January 2024 puts the first full seven-year look-back at deaths from 1 January 2031. That last date is our arithmetic from the two paragraphs above, not a figure the statute states; the two paragraphs are what we are confident of.

Two limits on scope are worth noting. The article applies to a person who receives something on the death; someone who inherits nothing does not have gifts pulled back. And it reaches only gifts from the person who died — not gifts from anyone else.

1 February to 15 March — unless you leave Japan first

Art.28(1) sets the filing period for the year's gift tax at 1 February to 15 March of the following year. It also carries a parenthetical that matters to anyone whose stay in Japan is finite, and it is the same device that appears in the inheritance tax article:

Read the condition carefully, because it is narrower than the sentence first suggests. It bites where, between 1 January and 15 March of the filing year, you cease to have both a jusho and a kyosho (居所) — a place of residence — in Japan, without having filed the notification of a nozei kanrinin (納税管理人), a tax agent. In that case the period ends on the day you cease to have them. Leaving in October, before the period opens, is not what this sentence addresses.

The practical reading is simple enough: appointing a tax agent before you go keeps the ordinary deadline. Note also that a return is what carries the claims — the special rate table, the spouse deduction and the housing exclusion are each conditional on being claimed in it.

What to ask, and what we could not confirm

We are not tax accountants and this is not advice about anyone's position. What the statute does allow us to do is tell you which questions actually decide the answer, so that a paid hour is spent on them rather than on the basics.

• ■Which of the four categories in Art.1-4(1) applies to me, and does my status of residence sit in Appended Table 1 or Table 2 of the Immigration Act?
• ■For gifts from abroad: was the person giving a 外国人贈与者 or a 非居住贈与者 at the time, and does that carve-out reach me?
• ■How do my periods of jusho in Japan add up against the fifteen-year, ten-year test — and from what date does each period run?
• ■Is what I received within Art.21-3(1)(ii) as ordinarily necessary living or education costs, given how it was actually used?
• ■If both rate tables are in play this year, what does Art.70-2-5(3) produce, and what has to go in the return to claim the special table at all?
• ■Before electing the settlement system: what does Art.21-9(6) mean for this donor over the next twenty years?

What we could not confirm

Three things, stated plainly rather than filled in.

• ■Any figure for “ordinarily necessary”. The statute sets none, nothing is delegated on the point, and the circular's standard is a weighing of needs against means rather than an amount. We have not stated a threshold because no primary source contains one. We also did not retrieve the National Tax Agency's December 2013 questions and answers on support between family members, which may address it further.
• ■Whether the Art.70-2 housing window will be extended past 31 December 2026. We can only report the text in force on 11 August 2026, which ends there.
• ■How the tax authority treats a special permanent resident (特別永住者) for these definitions. The status arises under a separate act rather than from either appended table, which is the same open question we recorded in the inheritance tax guide. We did not find a ruling on it and have not guessed.

One further thing we have deliberately not written: anything about structuring transfers to stay under a threshold. Nothing on this page is a plan, and the sections above are descriptions of what the statute says rather than suggestions about what to do.

Sources

Every provision below was read on 11 August 2026 from the version in force on that date, using the Japanese government's own e-Gov service. Where a figure is stated in one act and overridden in another, both are named.

Inheritance Tax Act (相続税法), Art.1-4 and Art.2-2

Gift tax is inside the Inheritance Tax Act, not in an act of its own. Art.1-4(1) lists four categories of person who owe it, in items (i) to (iv). Item (i) is a person who had a 住所 in Japan when the property was acquired, split between (a) an individual who is not a 一時居住者 and (b) one who is, with (b) carved out where the donor was an 外国人贈与者 or a 非居住贈与者. Item (ii) is a person with no 住所 in Japan, split between (a) Japanese nationals — (1) those who had a 住所 here at some point in the ten years before the gift and (2) those who did not — and (b) non-nationals, with (a)(2) and (b) carved out on the same condition about the donor. Items (iii) and (iv) are residual: an individual who acquires property located in Japan and falls outside item (i) or item (ii) respectively. Art.2-2 attaches the scope: items (i) and (ii) are taxed on the whole of what was acquired, items (iii) and (iv) only on what is located in Japan. Art.1-4(3) defines the three terms the carve-outs turn on — 一時居住者 in item (i), 外国人贈与者 in item (ii) and 非居住贈与者 in item (iii). Art.1-4(2) adds a deeming rule for people within the exit-tax deferral provisions of the Income Tax Act. Art.21 states the charge from the other direction, as an amount 贈与により財産を取得した者に係る贈与税額. We read the text as in force on 11 August 2026.

26 U.S.C. §2502(c) — for the contrast with the United States

Subsection (c) is headed 'Tax to be paid by donor' and reads in full: 'The tax imposed by section 2501 shall be paid by the donor.' This is the only non-Japanese provision cited on this page, and it is here because the direction of the charge is the point most easily carried over wrongly from one system to the other. We have not examined any other aspect of United States gift tax, and nothing on this page should be read as a statement about it.

Inheritance Tax Act, Art.34(4) — the donor's secondary liability

Art.34(4) provides that a person who gave property 連帯納付の責めに任ずる — bears joint liability — for gift tax of the recipient, in the amount prescribed by cabinet order as the recipient's gift tax for the year of acquisition multiplied by the proportion that the value of that property bears to the value of the property brought into the taxable amount, and 当該財産の価額に相当する金額を限度として, capped at an amount corresponding to the value of that property. It is a liability for another person's assessed tax rather than a charge on the donor: the assessment and the return remain the recipient's. Paragraphs (5) and (6) set out the notification and demand procedure, and are written for inheritance tax.

Inheritance Tax Act, Art.1-3(3)(i) — where 在留資格 is defined for both taxes

The definition of 一時居住者 in Art.1-4(3)(i), which governs gift tax, uses the term 在留資格 without defining it. The definition is in the inheritance-tax article before it. Art.1-3(3)(i) reads 在留資格 as 出入国管理及び難民認定法別表第一（在留資格）の上欄の在留資格 and then extends that reading by the parenthetical 次号及び次条第三項において同じ — the next item, and paragraph 3 of the next article, which is Art.1-4(3). So the Table 1 restriction reaches Art.1-4(3) by cross-reference and not by anything written in Art.1-4 itself. Reading Art.1-4 alone would suggest that any status of residence counts; it does not. We checked this specifically because the gift-tax text on its own reads as unrestricted. The restriction operates only where the term appears, which is items (i) and (ii) of Art.1-4(3); item (iii), 非居住贈与者, is defined by domicile in Japan within the previous ten years and by nationality, and does not use the term.

Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (出入国管理及び難民認定法), Appended Tables 1 and 2

Appended Table 1 lists statuses defined by the activity permitted in Japan — among them 教授, 芸術, 宗教, 報道, 高度専門職, 経営・管理, 技術・人文知識・国際業務, 留学 and 家族滞在. Appended Table 2 lists four defined by personal status rather than activity: 永住者, 日本人の配偶者等, 永住者の配偶者等 and 定住者. Because the tax definitions point only at the upper column of Table 1, a person holding a Table 2 status is outside them.

Inheritance Tax Act, Art.21-3(1)(ii) and Art.1-2(i) — support within a family

Art.21-3(1) lists property whose value is not brought into the taxable amount at all. Item (ii) covers 扶養義務者相互間において生活費又は教育費に充てるためにした贈与により取得した財産のうち通常必要と認められるもの. Art.1-2(i) defines 扶養義務者 as 配偶者及び民法第八百七十七条（扶養義務者）に規定する親族 — the spouse, plus the relatives on whom the Civil Code places a duty of support. The exclusion is qualified twice over: by purpose (living costs or education) and by the words 通常必要と認められるもの, which limit it to what is regarded as ordinarily necessary. Item (ii) carries no delegation to a cabinet order or ministerial ordinance — within Art.21-3 those run to item (iii), on public-interest undertakings, and item (v), on the mutual-aid schemes — so the test for what is ordinarily necessary is not filled in below the level of the act. It is supplied by the National Tax Agency's circular; see the next entry.

Basic Circular on the Inheritance Tax Act (相続税法基本通達), 21の3-3 to 21の3-6

The National Tax Agency's circular is an instruction to tax officials on how to apply the act. It is not legislation and does not bind a court, but it is the only published statement of the test and it is what officials work from. 21の3-3 reads 生活費 as the costs necessary to lead an ordinary daily life, excluding education costs, treating medical costs and the costs of raising a child as included. 21の3-4 reads 教育費 as tuition, teaching materials and stationery ordinarily necessary for the person's education, and notes it is not confined to compulsory education. 21の3-5 reads the exclusion as reaching property acquired 必要な都度直接これらの用に充てるために — as and when needed, to be applied directly to those purposes — and provides that where property taken under the heading of living or education costs is 預貯金した (put into savings) or applied to the purchase price of shares or of a house, that amount is to be treated as other than ordinarily necessary. 21の3-6 sets the range as 被扶養者の需要と扶養者の資力その他一切の事情を勘案して社会通念上適当と認められる範囲. No figure appears in any of them. The page is served in Shift_JIS.

Civil Code (民法), Art.877

The article the tax definition points to, for the class of relatives who owe a duty of support. We link the Civil Code so a reader can check the class for themselves; the guide does not restate its content beyond noting that lineal blood relatives are within it, which is what makes a parent abroad a 扶養義務者 for the purpose of Art.21-3(1)(ii).

Inheritance Tax Act Art.21-5, and Special Taxation Measures Act Art.70-2-4

Art.21-5 of the Inheritance Tax Act states the annual deduction as 六十万円. Art.70-2-4(1) of the Special Taxation Measures Act provides that, for a person who acquired property by gift on or after 1 January 2001, the deduction is 百十万円 notwithstanding Art.21-5. Art.70-2-4(2) deems the amount so deducted to have been deducted under Art.21-5. The same pattern repeats for the settlement system: Art.21-11-2 of the Inheritance Tax Act says 六十万円 and Art.70-3-2 of the Special Taxation Measures Act substitutes 百十万円 for gifts from 1 January 2024.

Inheritance Tax Act Art.21-7 and Special Taxation Measures Act Art.70-2-5

Art.21-7 sets the general table and directs that the base be divided into the listed bands, each multiplied by its rate and the results added. The bands are ¥2m at 10%, to ¥3m at 15%, to ¥4m at 20%, to ¥6m at 30%, to ¥10m at 40%, to ¥15m at 45%, to ¥30m at 50%, above at 55%. Art.70-2-5(1) sets the special table for property acquired by gift from a 直系尊属 on or after 1 January 2015 by a person restricted by その年一月一日において十八歳以上の者に限る: ¥2m at 10%, to ¥4m at 15%, to ¥6m at 20%, to ¥10m at 30%, to ¥15m at 40%, to ¥30m at 45%, to ¥45m at 50%, above at 55%. Art.70-2-5(2) disapplies the special table to gifts made before the recipient became a lineal descendant part-way through a year. Art.70-2-5(3) is the blend where both kinds are received in one year. Art.70-2-5(4) makes the special table conditional on claiming it in the return with the prescribed schedule.

Inheritance Tax Act, Art.21-6 — the spouse deduction

Art.21-6(1) allows ¥20,000,000 against the taxable amount where a person receives, from a spouse to whom they have been married for twenty years or more, residential land or a dwelling located in Japan or money to buy one; the property must be occupied by 15 March of the following year with the intention of continuing to live there; and the person must not have taken the deduction for a gift from that same spouse in an earlier year. Art.21-6(2) makes it conditional on the return carrying the amount claimed and a statement that it was not taken in an earlier year, with the documents the Ministry of Finance ordinance prescribes. Art.21-6(3) lets the tax office authority accept a late document where there was an unavoidable reason for its absence.

Special Taxation Measures Act, Art.70-2 — money from a lineal ascendant for a home

Art.70-2(1) excludes from the taxable amount, up to the 住宅資金非課税限度額, money received from a lineal ascendant and applied to building or buying a home, where the window runs 令和六年一月一日から令和八年十二月三十一日までの間 — 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2026 — and the conditions in items (i) to (iii) about applying the whole sum and occupying by 15 March of the following year are met. Art.70-2(2)(vi) sets the ceiling at ¥10,000,000 where the home meets one of the listed energy, earthquake-resistance or accessibility requirements, and ¥5,000,000 otherwise. Art.70-2(2)(i) defines 特定受贈者 by reference to 相続税法第一条の四第一項第一号又は第二号 — so the exclusion is available only to those two categories — and adds an income ceiling of ¥20,000,000, or ¥10,000,000 where the floor area is below the prescribed size, and an age of eighteen on 1 January. Art.70-2(14) makes it conditional on claiming it in the return with the prescribed schedule.

Inheritance Tax Act, Art.21-9 — the settlement election

Art.21-9(1) opens the election where the recipient is a presumptive heir who is a lineal descendant of the donor and was eighteen or older on 1 January of the year, and the donor was sixty or older on the same day. Art.21-9(2) requires a notification to the district director within the Art.28(1) period. Art.21-9(5) defines 相続時精算課税適用者 and 特定贈与者 and keeps the system running for that donor even if the recipient ceases to be a presumptive heir. Art.21-9(6) reads 相続時精算課税適用者は、第二項の届出書を撤回することができない.

Inheritance Tax Act, Art.19 — the add-back on a later death

The article is headed 相続開始前七年以内に贈与があつた場合の相続税額. Art.19(1) brings gifts from the deceased in the seven years before the death into the inheritance tax base, and provides in a parenthetical that for the part of that property acquired otherwise than within three years before the death, the total is reduced by 百万円 — one million yen against the whole of years four to seven, not per year. Gift tax already charged on the added-back property is credited. Art.19(2) defines 特定贈与財産, the portion covered by the Art.21-6 spouse deduction, which Art.19(1) excludes from the add-back. The seven-year figure is not yet operative. The transitional provisions of the amending act, Act No. 3 of 31 March 2023, govern it: Art.19(1) of those provisions applies the new Art.19(1) to property acquired by gift on or after 1 January 2024 and leaves earlier gifts under the former rules, and Art.19(2) provides that for a person acquiring property by inheritance or bequest 令和六年一月一日から令和八年十二月三十一日までの間 — between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2026 — the new Art.19(1) applies with 「七年」 read as 「三年」. We retrieved these from the supplementary provisions carried in the e-Gov text of the act, identified by the amending act number 令和五年三月三一日法律第三号. The statement in the guide that a full seven-year look-back first arises for deaths from 1 January 2031 is our own arithmetic from those two paragraphs and is identified as such there; the statute states the two paragraphs, not the date.

Act on Securing Proper Taxation in relation to Overseas Remittances (内国税の適正な課税の確保を図るための国外送金等に係る調書の提出等に関する法律), Art.4

Art.4(1) requires a financial institution, where a customer carries out an 国外送金等 through its office, to file a statement with the district director by the end of the month following the month of the exchange transaction. Item (i) covers an outbound remittance and item (ii) covers 国外からの送金等の受領, the receipt of a remittance from overseas, so the duty runs in both directions. The article excludes remittances at or below an amount fixed by cabinet order, and Art.8(1) of that order (Cabinet Order No. 363 of 1997) fixes it at 百万円. The duty is the institution's; it is not a filing obligation of the customer and it does not itself determine whether anything is taxable.

Inheritance Tax Act, Art.28 — the return

Art.28(1) requires a return where there is gift tax under Arts.21-5, 21-7 and 21-8, or where the property falls under the settlement system and there is a taxable amount left after the Art.21-11-2 deduction. The period is その年の翌年二月一日から三月十五日まで, with a parenthetical that where, between 1 January and 15 March of that following year, the person ceases to have both a 住所 and a 居所 in Japan without having filed the tax agent notification under Art.117(2) of the Act on General Rules for National Taxes, the period ends on the day they cease to have them.

Act on General Rules for National Taxes (国税通則法), Arts.118 and 119

Art.118(1) rounds the taxable base of a national tax — taken after any amount deducted from it for the purpose of applying the rate — down to a whole ¥1,000, and to zero where the whole of it is under ¥1,000. Art.119(1) rounds the settled amount of a national tax down to a whole ¥100, and to zero where the whole of it is under ¥100. Both articles exclude stamp duty, which is why the stamp duty figures elsewhere on this site do not carry these roundings.