TOKYO, Feb. 10 - Harder times may be ahead for the practitioners of Japan's traditional arts and sports - expected to wither away after the occupation but actually enjoying a a boom.
    Local prefectural officials now have announced that they expect to levy special taxes on Japan's giant Sumo wrestlers, players of “go,” and "shogi," a form of Oriental chess, flower arrangers, public letter writers, story tellers and a dozen other occupations that date back to the Middle Ages.
    The difficulty is that, despite the occupation policy of establishing greater local autonomy in Japan by giving the prefectures - corresponding to the American states - authority over their own police, school systems and other activities, few if any new sources of funds have been available. The national government still draws down all major sources of income.
    The decision to levy upon the ancient occupations of Japan was made recently at a conference of tax officials of the central Honshu area. They will apply to the Diet's local finance committee for permission to take the necessary measures.
    Though angered protests are likely to go up from the Japanese man it the street, local authorities have some arguments on their side.
    One is that conjurors, for example, though they are an old and honored class in Japan, are clearly "non-productive" from an economic viewpoint. The little man who produces scores of paper fans in brilliant colors from a bowl of clear water produces nothing that goes to the national rehabilitation that Japan desperately needs and hardly seems to fit into the austerity program the Allies now demand.
    Another argument is that many of the classes named are better off than appears on the surface and have excellent chances for income tax evasion.
     The barrel-chested, long-haired Sumo wrestlers are a case in point. Sumo was on the point of disappearance at the end of the war, though the wrestlers drew special rations to keep them at their peak weights of 300 pounds or more.
    But this spring the Sumo association was able to spend 8,000,000 yen to build a new temporary stadium. It attracted audiences of 10,000 persons a day for thirteen days at a single tournament this winter, almost paying for the cost of the building. Such published figures available to the tax collector, make no mention of the sums the wrestlers may have won by careful betting.
    Prefectural authorities, in their desperate search for funds to support the new local autonomy, already have gone to strange lengths to find income sources. Most prefectures have a tax on Geisha girls and at least one taxes public baths.