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The story
A growing number of farmers are closing their unmanned vegetable stands, where customers could buy freshly harvested produce. On top of losses where “no matter how many times I count, the money doesn’t add up,” rumors have even spread that “the tax office is moving in.”
The thread ranged from speculation about who’s responsible, to proposals for switching to coin-locker-style vending machines, to terms describing how thoroughly different industries get taxed, like “kuroyon” and “togosanpin.”
8/22 (Sat) 8:00
Daily Shincho
Being able to buy freshly harvested vegetables is a blessing, but…
Source: topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Crime keeps rising because idiots who believe 'humans are basically good' keep setting these things up.
Everyone has some evil in their heart.
These idiots are just handing people a stage to show it off.
They're the reason there are more criminals now.
The Showa era grew its economy on the belief that people are fundamentally good, you know.
You're misunderstanding what 'people are inherently good' (性善説) actually means. It says everyone is born good but can turn bad due to later influences — it acknowledges the existence of evil too. For the sake of Mencius, who died 2,400 years ago, let me stress that point.
They go after whoever's easiest to squeeze. They're too incompetent to touch the people raking it in through asset management.
There are whole industries where you just know nobody's filing taxes. Makes you wonder what the tax office is even looking at.
Like tutors raking in serious cash — they start it as a side gig but end up pulling in a lot. Same with housewives listed as dependents. Since it's all private, individual work, there's no paper trail. And it's not just tutoring.
Coin-locker type sounds good. Why doesn't everyone just do that?
Even here it's all 'tax evasion' this and 'stop complaining' that — full of insults you can barely stand to read.
Enslaving other people was never tied to any sense of shame to begin with — there was no concept of human rights.
Isn't it even questionable whether this is humans doing it at all?
Japan's got crows, that bear that's been famous lately, wild boars charging around — plenty of suspects to go around, no?Someone unfamiliar with it might just assume it's a 'help yourself, free to take' kind of setup.
They really should install security cameras.
That said, even free bento shops with security cameras have people trying to cheat the system. You see them getting caught all the time in those TV station YouTube clips.
The old geezers on 5ch always spin things to suit themselves, so this is a preemptive warning, lol. They've got us completely figured out, lol.
They add that disclaimer because otherwise some people lose it. It's just a stock preface — deep down they probably still think it's foreigners.
There are old folks who convince themselves 'it's probably just B-grade stuff, so I don't need to pay.' People on small pensions or without jobs could be stealing too. If you've got a yard, just grow your own — I bought two 100-yen packs of seeds last year, scattered some cucumber seeds in a corner of my yard, and so far I've harvested and eaten three.
Vending machines have really increased, huh.
The ones near me are coin-locker-type vending machines. No electricity needed either — this is the best option. You can get blemished peaches, 4 for 200 yen, and they're super popular.
Never heard of it. You an old man or something?
Correction:
✕ 'gotousanpin'
◯ 'togosanpin'
I heard there are people who force them open, and the repair costs end up being pretty steep.
I don't feel like buying if I can't actually touch the produce. Honestly, this isn't the kind of business worth sinking equipment investment into anyway.
Background and Key Points
Unmanned vegetable stands (無人販売所, mujin hanbaijo) are a fixture of rural Japan: a farmer sets out surplus produce by the roadside with a coin box and no attendant, trusting buyers to pay on the honor system. They’ve long been cited abroad as a symbol of Japanese trust and low crime, and several posters explicitly invoke “seizen-setsu” (性善説), the idea that people are fundamentally good — one corrects the popular reading by noting this is a mistranslation of Mencius, who held that people are born good but can be corrupted, not that they stay good regardless of circumstance. The tax terms that come up, “kuroyon” (9:6:4) and “togosanpin” (10:5:3:1), are decades-old shorthand in Japan for how unevenly the tax agency can actually verify income across job types — salaried workers are withheld at the source and nearly fully captured, while cash-based farm income is the hardest category to trace, historically estimated at only 30-40% reported accurately.
The thread doesn’t converge on who’s actually taking the money — commenters float shoplifting locals, cash-strapped pensioners, and even foreign workers, but no one offers evidence, and several posters call out the reflexive “must be foreigners” framing as bias rather than fact. The more concrete disagreement is over fixes: whether coin-locker-style vending machines (already spreading, and cited as popular even without electricity) solve the problem, versus the risk that people will just pry them open, making the investment questionable for what is a low-margin side business.
What’s easy to miss is that the “tax office” angle is speculative — no post cites an actual audit or crackdown. It reads as dark humor built on the reputation of togosanpin, i.e., a suspicion that authorities are more likely to chase easily-verifiable farm-stand cash than the frequently-cited “real” money in asset management or under-the-table tutoring.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “More farmers are closing their ‘unmanned vegetable stands’ selling freshly harvested produce… alongside losses where ‘no matter how many times I count, the money doesn’t add up,’ rumors are also spreading that ‘the tax office is moving in’.”
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