In 1990, just before the collapse of the bubble economy, Japan’s tax revenue was 60.1 trillion yen, but by 2009 it had slumped to 38.4 trillion yen. In Japan there’s an expression: “tax is the nation.” What it means is that the behavior of people and companies is heavily influenced by the tax system. In the globalized world of today, an urgent task is to transform Japan’s tax system with reference to international standards in order to ensure that economic growth benefits the national coffers.