The ruling Liberal Democratic Party is already thinking about next year's local government elections and in order to help their candidates is studying a possible increase in the maximum tax deduction afforded to people who contribute "hometown taxes" (furusato nozei), a system that was implemented in 2008 to help regional municipalities struggling with budget shortfalls.
Because an increasing portion of the population is concentrated in large metropolitan areas, local government tax bases are eroding. The hometown tax diverts some of the money people pay to big city governments to these smaller municipalities in the form of donations. In order to make the system attractive to taxpayers, the central government offered deductions not only for national income taxes, but also for local income taxes.
Taxpayers can donate funds to a local government that is different from the one where they live, and despite the name of the system it doesn't have to be their hometown. It can be any locality. Say you live in Tokyo but you want to help out a town in Fukushima devastated in the disaster of 2011, something that many people have used the furusato nozei to do. If you donate 20,000 to that town in Fukushima through the hometown tax system you can get a deduction off your national tax bill this year, and since local income taxes are based on national income taxes, this deduction, as well as a separate deduction for charitable donations, is reflected in your local tax bill the following year, which will be lower that it would have been otherwise as a result. So for the ¥20,000 donation, the taxpayer ends up with an ¥18,000 tax savings (¥20,000 minus a ¥2,000 handling fee).