Planting tax

Abstract This study examines how Japanese sixth-grade children aged 11–12 use multimodal metaphor to conceptualise taxation in a public civic contest. While previous studies have shown that children use metaphor to construct meaning, much less is known about how children use image and short text to explain taxation as a civic process, including what tax is, how its effects develop, and what kinds of public benefits it enables. Drawing on a corpus of 712 tax-themed postcards produced by children in Akita, Japan, the study analyses 28 instances of the attributional metaphor tax is a plant . Although less frequent than dominant relational metaphors such as support, plant is analytically significant because it reworks conventional civic meanings through the connected ideas of growth, cultivation, and development. Adopting a children-as-theory-makers perspective, the study investigates how this metaphor is realised across visual and verbal modes and how it makes children’s understandings of taxation publicly interpretable. The findings identify three recurrent subtypes: tax is a flower, tax is a seed/seedling , and tax is a tree/leaf . These subtypes model taxation respectively as visible civic flourishing, delayed investment in future wellbeing, and a sustaining source whose benefits branch across public life. mono-visual realisations are most frequent, showing that much of the conceptual work is carried pictorially, while metonymic cues such as coins, schools, hospitals, roads, police cars, houses, and public-service icons specify the civic domains to which the plant metaphors apply. The study argues that these postcards are not merely illustrative responses but acts of theorising, in which children creatively transform culturally available meanings of taxation into publicly intelligible models of social contribution, future growth, and collective care.