What was the “Corona Temporary Subsidy for Local Development”, a random appropriation of a different dimension… People pursuing the “facts” without discovery.

The total budget was 17.126 trillion yen!

The much-talked-about film “Elpisu: Hope or Disaster” (produced by Kantele and Fuji TV), starring Masami Nagasawa, has made many people think about the state of power and the media.

After all, Japan ranks 71st in the Reporters Without Borders international journalist organization’s ranking of press freedom in 2022.

In fact, many TV stations and newspapers are now almost entirely government public relations organizations.

In such a situation, did you know that there are people who pursue the “facts” without any discovery at all?

Tansa (Tokyo Investigative Newsroom Tansa) is a non-profit organization. Tansa is a journalism organization that specializes in investigative reporting and aims to change the situation for the victims by uncovering and reporting the facts through independent reporting.

Tansa’s predecessor, Waseda Chronicle, was created in 2017 at the Waseda University Journalism Institute. Although it is an organization with only three reporters in addition to its editor-in-chief, Shu Watanabe, it has cut into numerous cases of injustice and waste of taxpayers’ money.

One of them is the “Exploratory Reporting Series: Fictional Local Development. Mariko Tsuji, one of the main reporters, says, “Tansa has a lot to do with JUDGEM.

Tansa has a database called JUDGIT! that allows anyone to look up the “purpose,” “contents,” “results,” “budget payers,” and “amount” of more than 5,000 projects conducted by government ministries and agencies.

This database is jointly produced and operated by four organizations: the policy think tank, Concept Japan, the Yosuke Onoe Laboratory of the Department of Information Science and Technology at Nihon University’s College of Humanities and Sciences, Visualizing.JP, and Tansa. I realized that the “Temporary Grant for Local Development” was such a large amount of money. When the Cabinet Office started the grant program, it boldly stated that the grant could be used in any way, which also bothered me, so I decided to look into it.”

The Ministry of Finance has failed to grasp “wasteful spending!”

The case was initiated around June 2021. The interview team consisted of “about 2.5 full-time equivalents” with Mr. Tsuji as the main person, two part-time student interns, and the editor-in-chief.

The original article was based on a database created by the company, which summarized 65,000 projects funded by a total of 3 trillion yen from the first and second supplementary budgets for FY2020. The database was first created in September 2021, and when the series was first published in March 2010, the response to the database gradually increased.

“When I first asked the Ministry of Finance’s main accounting bureau how they managed wasteful spending, they said, ‘We don’t know, we’re just picking up the reports.

Although the Cabinet Office also said it would conduct verification, the actual work was left to Nomura Research Institute, and the results of the verification of projects awarded in FY2020 were finally made public in the spring of 2022. At the time we were starting the project, no verification had been completed, and budgets were being added one after another during this period.

There was some sporadic media coverage, but Tansa was the first to show a comprehensive and significant picture.

The fact that we conducted our research from the standpoint of taxpayers and centered on the viewpoint of whether we could really be satisfied with this kind of use of public funds was what led to the response,” he said.

The criteria used to select wasteful spending were “replacement of the general budget,” “unrelated to corona measures and local development,” and “disbursement of cash.

Stuffed animals, fireworks, membership fees for dating sites… The shocking contents of the “Corona Local Creation Temporary Grant: The 100 Worst Projects in Japan

One of the most shocking among the 100 worst projects was the “replica of the Jomon goddess.

Funagata Town is located in Yamagata Prefecture and has an aging population of 42%. At a cost of 6.49 million yen, two replicas of the Jomon Goddess, a national treasure clay figurine from the Jomon period excavated in the town, were produced.