All's fare

I wonder how this will effect train passes. Will current passes become invalid from April first or will it be automatically calculated when you renew your pass? My pass runs out in mid-April, so I suspect it will become invalid from the first. This is gonna create huge problems for commuters and companies alike. Expect to see huge lines at the ticket machines on April fools day!

The JR-window-lady told me to buy a 3 or 6-month pass to save money, instead of having to renew in April. That would mean passes are not invalidated.

@disillusioned if you really think so, you really don't know anything about sales tax, value added tax or whatever you want to call it. But allow me to explain to you: it is calculated the very moment you buy something. Buy a pencil at the 100 yen shop on March 31st and you will pay 105 yen... buy another on April 1st and you will pay 108 yen, you already bought your train pass, so you already have paid the tax, your opinion therefore is complete nonsense.... indeed if you travel the same route everyday, and you need to renew before the end of March...take a longer pass, 3 or 6 months.

Our company pays for all our transport and we had to submit our updated transport costs a week ago. If you're holding a teiki now, it'll run out at some point in the future so you'll have to buy another at the adjusted cost.

If you really want to squeeze any value out of it, you could in theory put about 100,000 yen on your Suica or whatever now, that way you'll have paid the non-adjusted price for loads of transport and theoretically be making money from what your company reimburses you with.

wipeoutMar. 24, 2014 - 06:09PM JST It is 5% now and will be 8% in April. That's pretty obviously not "going up by 3%", but by 60%.

Yay! I'm not the only one who dislikes this sort of sloppy writing. A change in sales tax from 5% to 8% is an increase of 3 percentage points, and an increase of 66.6*%.

Looking foward to a less crowd and comfortable seat in coming days !

Hang on! Why all the negativity? The company I work for has students that paid in advance and if they don't take their classes before April first the company has to pay tax on them, so why is a train pass any different?

and an increase of 66.6*%.

I think you mean 60%.

The tax increases by 60% but the net effect is a 3% increase in the cost of goods purchased.

The sales tax went from 5% to 8%. That's a tax increase of 3%. A tax increase of 60%... would mean you live in Europe.

bilderberg_2015Mar. 24, 2014 - 08:37PM JST

and an increase of 66.6*%.

I think you mean 60%.

Yes. I don't know what I was thinking when I divided 3 by 5 and got any result other than 0.6.

Again, since you want to be nit-picky, it's an increase of more than 60%. The tax itself will be increased from 5% to 8%. As was said, it's just sloppy wording.

Not sloppy at all. The tax on a ¥1,000 purchase will be 3% higher April 1st than it is now. The final cost of a ¥1,000 purchase will go from ¥1,050 to ¥1,080, an increase of 2.8%

...and soon it will be a 100% increase in today's 5% tax rate. Doesn't matter which way you slice it, THIS IS BAD FOR JAPAN. I hope the Japanese economy doesn't stall because of this over the next couple of months. Imagine the crafty back peddling to fix that mess.