I passed the exam for a Japanese Certified Public Tax Accountant (a.k.a “Zeirishi” in Japanese) in 1996.
Since then, I had been working as an in-house tax advisor in multinational firms.
In 2018, I started a new career as a freelancer based in Kanda Ogawamachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.
Born in Miyazaki Prefecture in 1965.
I grew up in Miyazaki City until I graduated from high school, except for a year when I moved to Kagoshima (the next prefecture to Miyazaki)when my father moved to work.
Left Miyazaki to attend the university in Tokyo.
In 1988, received a bachelor of commerce degree from the university and joined a major leasing company in Tokyo. Assigned to the company controllers group and engaged in consolidated financial statements and annual reports under the Japanese Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (alike Form 10-K required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission).
In 1994, joined one of the big-four accounting firms.
Passed the last subject of the JCPTA exam in 1996.
As a junior accountant, engaged in bookkeeping, preparation of financial statements, payroll and social insurance taxes, preparation of tax returns for small-mid size corporate clients.
Then, as a senior accountant, assigned to the financial industry group and was in charge of tax compliance and advisory for foreign financial institutions.
Registered and licensed as a JCPTA in 1997.
In 1997, I joined a foreign financial institution in Tokyo.
In its Tax Department, engaged in the firm’s corporate income tax return preparation, reporting to its US parent company, coordination for setting transfer pricing policies.
Handled tax inquiries from both onshore and offshore colleagues as long as it could constitute tax implication in Japan.
2015年には別の外資系金融機関に転じ、ここでも税務部で前職同様の業務を担当しました。
In 2015, I moved to another foreign-affiliated financial institution, where I was in charge of the same duties as my previous job in the Tax Department.
Although each firm I worked for developed large and advanced internal EDP systems, they faced some difficulties in catching up with changes in accounting and tax rules increasingly being complicated year by year.
It was because that limited IT resources were primarily allocated to profit centers, not back-office such as Finance and Tax. Consequently, we had to compile and compute the necessary data by ourselves by off-line manual work while we were on the waiting list.
Even large multinational financial institutions still needed the workforce for such groundwork.
I was one of them. Requested raw data to IT and Finance, downloaded them to spreadsheets then run massive numbers of calculations on my desktop PC.
Such experience familiarized me with data processing using Excel spreadsheet.
Experienced tax audit many times.
Because of the tax classification as a “large corporation”, all the firms I worked for had gone through tax audits conducted by the Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau.
Dealing with TRTB, known for intensive and stringent audit in terms of the number of auditors and duration compared to audit by local tax offices, was a tough experience.
However it was also a meaningful experience as I was able to understand their perception of hot tax issues through discussion with them.
現場で鍛えた英語力 Talking about tax in English
20年ほど外資系企業で仕事をしたおかげで、ビジネスレベルの英会話ができます。
Having worked for the foreign firms for about 20 years, I can speak English at a business level.