Taxi fares have gone up 7%, a rare instance of inflation in a country where prices generally stay the same for years.

Unlike the U.S., Japan is a very centralized place where change always happens from the top down, and I found it interesting to note that the decision to allow the raise in rates for the whole country was handled by a single government ministry in Tokyo, not decided on a local level as you might expect. The higher rates are to give drivers a long-overdue raise, since most of them are earning what they made in the 1980s, and with no custom of tipping in Japan to help make up the difference.

Not every taxi company is raising their rates, however — some are keeping them the same, which effectively introduces price competition in an industry where none existed before.

While most of the world takes it for granted that taxi drivers will usually be from some often unpronounceable country, that’s not the case at all here, where virtually 100% of drivers are Japanese — after all, would you get into a cab driven by someone who couldn’t read kanji? Once, I did catch a TV show about an American who had decided to become a taxi driver and had passed all the required tests, but the fact that this was rare enough to make national TV shows how uncommon this is.