On July 23, the Director General of the DPJ Executive Office, Hirofumi Hirano, issued the following letter of protest.

In the television program "Sunday Project" broadcast on July 19, you used a flip chart created by the LDP to repeatedly criticize the DPJ for planning, in your opinion, to raise tax in connection with our proposed allowance for families with children. However, your flip chart and your statements contained fundamental errors.

Firstly, your flip chart suggested that the DPJ would increase the annual tax burden on families by 142,000 yen by abolishing income tax and local residents tax deductions. However, the deductions for spouse and dependants that the DPJ is proposing to abolish apply only to income tax and not to local residents tax.

Your chart also stated that the allowance for families with children would be a monthly payment of 13,000 yen, equivalent to an annual total of 156,000 yen. However, the monthly amount of 13,000 yen is simply a provisional figure, and the final planned amount of the allowance is 26,000 yen per month.

Based on the DPJ's actual proposals, it is not only married couples with two or more children but also married couples with one child who would benefit from increased income. The example family, referred to in the broadcast, of a husband earning 6 million yen a year, a wife who is a homemaker and a two-year-old child, would see their annual income increase by 160,000 yen. Even greater annual income increases would accrue to families including junior high school students, who do not currently receive a child allowance, and families where both husband and wife work and no spouse exemption is received in the first place.

Therefore, we find it completely unacceptable and cannot ignore the way you misled viewers with repeated criticisms based on misunderstanding and prejudice while showing charts that misrepresented even basic facts. In future, we ask that when you participate in policy debate, you base the content of your argument on accurate data. In addition to protesting strongly to you and to the LDP, we ask you to refrain from producing and using any further charts or advertisements based on mistaken criticisms