Japan runs a qualified-invoice system for consumption tax, a 20.42% withholding rate on payments to non-resident performers and crew, and a month-end payment cycle that does not map onto net-30/60/90 assumptions. None of the three is exotic on its own. Together, unannounced, they are where a clean-looking budget quietly loses money.
インボイス制度The qualified invoice system
Since 1 October 2023, a Japanese business can only claim a full consumption-tax credit on a purchase if the vendor is a registered qualified invoice issuer (適格請求書発行事業者). Registration is only open to taxable businesses — and a large share of individual Japanese freelancers, including many videographers, photographers and small crew, sit under Japan's tax-exempt revenue threshold and have not registered, because doing so converts them into a taxable business with new consumption-tax filing obligations of their own.
This does not stop you from hiring an unregistered freelancer. It changes what your Japanese production partner can reclaim on that cost, which is why some smaller vendors are priced slightly differently than registered ones for the same work.
The current transition rule lets a Japanese business claim 80% of the normal input tax credit on purchases from unregistered vendors. That drops to 50% on 1 October 2026 — seven weeks from this page's last revision — and to zero on 1 October 2029. Every unregistered freelancer in your crew list gets structurally more expensive to book on each of those two dates, even if their invoice amount never changes.
| Period | Credit on unregistered-vendor purchases |
|---|---|
| Oct 2023 – Sep 2026 | 80% |
| Oct 2026 – Sep 2029 | 50% |
| From Oct 2029 | 0% |
非居住者への源泉徴収Withholding on non-resident talent
Japan generally withholds tax at source on Japan-source income paid to a non-resident — which includes fees paid to foreign cast, directors, or crew for work carried out in Japan. The standard rate is 20.42% (20% income tax plus a 2.1% reconstruction surtax on that amount), withheld by the Japanese payer and remitted to the tax office, typically by the 10th of the month following payment.
A tax treaty between Japan and the recipient's home country can reduce or eliminate this withholding — but treaty relief is not automatic. It requires a treaty notification form (租税条約に関する届出書) filed with the Japanese payer, generally before the payment is made. Miss the filing and the standard 20.42% applies regardless of what the treaty technically allows; recovering the difference afterward means the recipient filing for a refund from Japan's tax authority from abroad, which is slow and easy to never get around to.
支払サイクルThe payment cycle
The Japanese default closes invoices at month end and pays at the end of the following month — commonly written as 月末締め翌月末払い (getsumatsu-shime, yokugetsu-matsu-barai). Work delivered on the 3rd of a month and work delivered on the 29th of the same month are both invoiced at that same month-end and paid together, at the end of the month after.
Foreign productions frequently assume net 60 or net 90 counted from delivery, which is a structurally different arrangement — under a closing-date system, the effective gap between delivery and payment can run anywhere from roughly 30 to 60 days depending purely on where in the month the work landed, not on any agreed term.
- Confirm the closing dateMonth-end is standard, but some vendors close mid-month. Get this in writing before the deal memo is signed.
- Confirm the payment dateEnd of the following month is standard. Some larger vendors push to end of the month after that — ask early.
- Fix the currencyYen or your currency, stated explicitly, not implied by the quote.
- Assign the FX spread and transfer feesInternational wire costs and exchange spread are real money on a large budget; decide who absorbs them before the first invoice arrives.