Japanese local authorities throughout the country find themselves in very similar financial straits. There have been recent cases of local authorities grappling with regenerating areas through the use of “cloud funding”, raising small amounts of money from an unspecified number of people through the internet. The use of funds for projects may vary but Kamakura City in Kanagawa Prefecture, the first local authority to introduce the programme for tourism projects, is looking to use the system for measures which can no longer rely on taxation.
In November 2013, Kamakura City began the “Think Kamakura Project”, soliciting donations for information boards on tourist routes. As the first local authority using cloud sourcing for tourism projects in Japan, Kamakura was able to raise the target 1,000,000 yen within three weeks by offering names of donators to be carved in the sign posts when they have made a donation of 10,000 yen.
Kamakura has many historically significant Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, some of them, like Sugimoto-dera, over 1,200 years old. Kōtoku-in (pic), with its monumental outdoor bronze statue of Amida Buddha, is the most famous. This iconic Daibutsu is arguably amongst the few images which have come to represent Japan in the world’s collective imagination. Kamakura also hosts the so-called Five Great Zen Temples (the Kamakura Gozan).
The architectural heritage of Kamakura is almost unmatched. In the city close to 20,000,000 visitors arrive every year, particularly on day trips and as the city is unable to receive tax revenue from the temples and shrines there is little economic benefit from tourism. With a fall in tax revenue due to the tough economic climate and severe situation in the public finances through increasingly demanding social security costs, it was thought that an appeal to tourists visiting the area and using the local facilities was needed. Crowd sourcing is also being thought of for preserving heritage sites and projects to make areas more green.
The origins of such fundraising can actually be found in the UK, with the launch of “JustGiving” as a way for social movements to. In 2000, Zarine Kharas and Anne-Marie Huby founded JustGiving, a company to provide online tools and processing services to enable the collection of charitable donations, allowing people to donate to charities registered with the site with a credit or debit card online, and offered people doing sponsored events the chance to build their own webpage to collect sponsorship from supporters. “JustGivingJapan” launched in 2010 and offers the same social media platforms for grass roots causes to penetrate social networks and fundraise for a variety of charitable and community based projects, Kamakura City being just one Japanese local authority experimenting on this new source of additional income for local regeneration.
Photo (c) Dirk Beyer / Wikimedia Commons
