Fureai kippu (in
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
ふれあい切符: Caring Relationship Tickets) is a Japanese
sectoral currency
A sectoral currency is a form of complementary currency that is restricted to a specific sector. Examples of sectoral currency are the Saber, which is restricted to the educational sector and thus can only be used to buy education, and the Fureai k ...
created in 1995 by the
Sawayaka Welfare Foundation
The Sawayaka Welfare Foundation (, ''Sawayaka Fukushi Zaidan'') is a Japanese foundation. Founded in 1991 by Tsutomu Hotta, former inspector and lawyer, under the name Sawayaka Welfare Promotion Center, it has been promoting its Fureai kippu syst ...
so that people could earn credits helping
seniors in their
community
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...
.
The basic unit of account is an
hour
An hour (symbol: h; also abbreviated hr) is a unit of time conventionally reckoned as of a day and scientifically reckoned between 3,599 and 3,601 seconds, depending on the speed of Earth's rotation. There are 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 ho ...
of
service to an
elderly
Old age refers to ages nearing or surpassing the life expectancy of human beings, and is thus the end of the human life cycle. Terms and euphemisms for people at this age include old people, the elderly (worldwide usage), OAPs (British usage ...
person. Sometimes seniors help each other and earn the credits, other times family members in other communities earn credits and transfer them to their parents who live elsewhere. For example, an elderly woman who no longer has a driver’s license; if you shop for her, you get credit for that, based on the kind of service and the number of hours. These credits accumulate- users may keep them for when they become sick or elderly themselves, then use the credits in exchange for services. Alternatively, the users may transfer credits to someone else.
A surprising part of the project has been that the elderly tend to prefer the services provided by people paid in Fureai Kippu over those paid in
yen
The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third-most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar (US$) and the euro. It is also widely used as a third reserve currency after the US dollar and the e ...
. This may be due to the personal connection. When they surveyed the elderly, it was clear they preferred the people who worked for Fureai kippu over the people who worked for yen because of the nature of the relationship. To convert this community service to yen would seem to dilute the community ethic.
There are two clearinghouses that send the credits from one side of Japan to the other.
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
, too, is starting to implement the Fureai kippu concept. By 2005, the largest
complementary currency
A complementary currency is a currency or medium of exchange that is not necessarily a national currency, but that is thought of as supplementing or complementing national currencies. Complementary currencies are usually not legal tender and thei ...
system in the world was in China.
These are early examples of a ‘marketplace revolution’ where fiat currency is broadened to Community Capital; economic, social, human, physical and cultural values. Tokenization enables asset valuation, in this case the unit of account for seniors credits in services provided. (Marketplace Revolution - from Concentrated Wealth to Community Capital by David LePage, Buy Social Canada 2020)
See also
*
Demurrage (currency)
Demurrage is the cost associated with owning or holding currency over a given period. It is sometimes referred to as a carrying cost of money. For commodity money such as gold, demurrage is the cost of storing and securing the gold. For paper curr ...
*
Fureai
''Fureai'' () is a Japanese term to refer to the formation of emotional connection between people of different age group and/or profession within the community.
Linguistic definition
The word "Fureai" is composed of "Fure" (of "Fureru" (), to to ...
*
Local exchange trading system
A local exchange trading system (also local employment and trading system or local energy transfer system; abbreviated LETS) is a locally initiated, democratically organised, not-for-profit community enterprise that provides a community infor ...
References
{{Reflist
Local currencies