Simple Japanese Inheritance Calculator

I made a thing again!

If you’re like me, a foreigner in your 40s living in Japan, the thought of dealing with inheritance taxes for your parents back home can be daunting. Understanding how these taxes might be applied is essential.

To help with this, I created an app: Japanese Inheritance Tax Calculator.

Here are a few insights:

• It’s not as straightforward as you might think.
• The calculation method actually offers some advantages for foreigners.
• The base deduction is quite high, meaning many people won’t owe taxes on even fairly sizable inheritances.

Bear in mind that this is a super simplified calculator: it only works in the case of a standard family unit where a parent of the user passes away and the user is the only heir living in Japan. But that’s fits me and a lot of my friends in Japan, so #scratchyourownitch it is.

It’s a tiny single page app built on Vite + React with shadcn/ui components. You can check out the code in the GitHub repo.