The author intends to clarify the process how the notion of “citizenship” braces multiple concepts in itself. This article
focuses on its core, “suffrage” and “tax liability”, and the connection between two. This article closely examines the
reasons why the Japanese have come to embrace such idea for taxation and become indifferent to the usage of their tax
money. Having suspected the social studies education may be partially responsible, the author reviewed the description in
the past elementary school social studies textbooks and followed its historical changes for analysis. 1) In the 1950s’
textbook published soon after the war, “political participation” and “tax burden” were described in relation to each other.
The textbook held its principle high and aimed to nurture children who would “consider the ways to spend their own tax
money, with that as criteria choose their representatives for the diet, and eventually ponder over the meaning of the
parliamentary government (sovereignty of the people)”. The author marked this principle as a foundation of citizenship
education. 2) In the 1960s, the textbook descriptions started to detach “political participation” and “tax burden”. The
elementary school social studies textbooks changed the structure and split the topics into two different sequences; one that
described that the Constitutions ensure the sovereignty of the people while the congressmen chosen by election run the
parliamentary government, and the other described that the expense required for the national politics were to be covered by
the tax money from the people. 3) The textbook in 1970s presented firstly “the function of the politics” (with detailed
examples of the policies) and then described “the politics by all” (how to run parliamentary government). This change
forced back the principle of nurturing citizenship in which the tax payers participate in politics and the only selected
policies which properly reflected their opinions come into practice. The emphasis was placed on tax liability. It did so by
presenting first the policies as reflection of the people’s wishes, then introducing the tax money as a fuel to realize those
policies. Such changes in the textbook descriptions appear to echo with the shift in the entities as watchdog on the usage of
tax money from the people to the diet.