When mid-June arrived, Sherlock encountered something he had never expected. It had nothing to do with Jujutsu Society; the trouble came from the Muggle side of things.
As everyone knew, after Japan fully Westernized, it developed a distinctive feature just like Uncle Sam's: homeless people.
You had surely heard the claim that the pressures of Japanese society had caused the homeless population to skyrocket, that they lived on the streets not because they were poor, but because they wanted to escape the pressure.
And among these homeless people were no shortage of former corporate executives and even people whose families could still be considered wealthy and prominent.
Sherlock could tell you unequivocally that all that talk about excessive pressure and escaping it was bullshit!
There were essentially only two reasons people became homeless, especially those former corporate executives: one was property tax, and the other was divorce!
Setting divorce aside for the moment-Japan's national circumstances were what they were-Sherlock found property tax alone to be an absolutely bottomless scam.
Japan's land was privately owned, with supposedly permanent ownership rights. Even Mount Fuji could be privately owned, but the problem lay precisely in that damned private ownership.
Japan's property tax came in two parts. One was land tax, divided into a fixed land tax and an urban land tax; the other was housing tax, divided into a fixed housing tax and an urban housing tax.
These two major taxes, encompassing four smaller taxes, had never been cheap. On top of that, Sherlock had inherited his property, so his annual taxes increased by a certain percentage every year.
Did you know what was even more of a rip-off?
The amounts of these four smaller taxes were not fixed, but calculated according to the assessed value of the land and house!
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