It's a long-standing tradition as a foreigner in Japan to laugh at some of the English one finds on t-shirts here. This is blatantly unfair, as anyone who lived through the entire "let's put Chinese characters on t-shirtｓ" fad in the UK should know. After all, while the middle-aged housewife wearing a HUSTLER t-shirt the other day may not have known what she was advertising, they probably at least thought it was talking about cowboys: frequently folks wearing, or worse tattooing, kanji on themselves didn't usually what they were actually saying. Then again, some of the shirts are quite funny, so I'll just hope that to balance my karma, some Japanese guy is laughing at some naff calligraphed t-shirt somewhere. [1]

Occasionally you see classics, mostly centering around sex in some way, shape, or form. (I've been told of a young girl with the t-shirt 1-800-FISTF---, and Dave Barry wrote about t-shirts from a band named King F----- Chicken, neither of which story I can confirm, but it wouldn't surprise me.) Rarely do you see one venturing into politics, however.

That changed today outside Ikebukuro's Red Wagon American Vintage Clothing Store. Hanging out front, in black typeset letters on a white shirt, was:
TAXES ARE EGREGIOUSLY HIGH!
HOWEVER YOU LOOK AT IT, TAXES SUCK.

For a moment I considered buying it, and then realized that on me, it simply wouldn't be funny.

[1]: My personal favorite was one of the spice girls, who got the characters for what she claimed was 'girl power' inked on her arm. Which was true, but I wondered if she knew that the characters she used for 'girl power' (女力) were roughly similar to those for 'horsepower' (馬力) or 'water power' (水力).