> Boom, a little cottage industry

This is the devil that lives in the details. You have an industry of people who are trying to get these charitable donations, and the towns that can't afford that industry or don't have anything particularly commercializable to sell get left in the dust.

For every town that becomes Country Ham Town, you have hundreds of small towns who are "random postcard town" who only get a few bucks a year. It's tough to say if they even make money vs losing money on that.

I wonder if this could get handled at the county level. The money could be dispersed equitably by the county seat, and people could choose from a number of gifts provided by the towns in the county

That's a good thought but why stop there? Why not have some kind of national government that collects tax dollars and apportions them according to need?

>and the towns that can't afford that industry or don't have anything particularly commercializable to sell get left in the dust.

What's wrong with this? If a town doesn't have anything to offer, then why does it exist at all? And why should anyone outside the town be supporting it to help its continued existence?

The western US is full of "ghost towns": towns that used to exist back in the 1800s during the mining boom then, but when the mines dried up, so did the towns. The people all left and the town fell back to nature. These days, there's usually nothing left besides building foundations, if that. Small towns these days that have nothing left to offer should go the same way.

[deleted, moved to parent discussion.]

I hate to rain on your parade, but for every one town trying to "fulfill your dream", you'd get ten doing stuff like "donate to our square town in the triangle state you hate, and we will pass laws to own those triangles for you". Then add the Amazon HQ debacle and similar on top, and sprinkle some sweet madness during any campaign season (which is most of the time at this point). I'm pretty sure that making taxes "fun" is "fun" in the same way that NFTs are "fun" investing.

I don't agree. The whole concept is diverting money from places that need it (the ones with all the residents) to places that don't. That was at least sentimentally understandable when people were sending tax dollars to places they have actual connections to, but once it becomes about securing some kind of consumer goods it doesn't even have that justification and will obviously benefit most municipalities which least need the help (since they will be most able to put together an appealing package). Anyway, if you want artisanal ham there are plenty of butchers who would appreciate your business.

Is that really the case, though? It seems like Tokyo (etc.) are still doing just fine, and a lot of the smaller towns that act as "feeders" for the big cities get a boost, which allows the small towns to do a better job of educating their kids, which directly helps the big cities later on.

I think you maybe missed all the details in the article that explains why it's a little unfair that the small towns spend money to educate their citizens, but then don't get to reap the benefits of that education?

I do agree with you that the end result in Japan is now a bit weird, since many people "pick their hometown" based on whatever gift/deal is available. But I think even in the original formulation, the benefits were much more than just "sentimental".

The "small towns" that get the most money this way are those that produce the best products, which tend to be the ones that were already the most successful. The most desperate towns gain very little from this scheme because they don't have anything to offer. The only reason that Tokyo isn't benefitting the most of all is that it's specifically excluded from taking part.

If the goal was to transfer some of Tokyo's tax income to towns that need it more, why not just do that, without all the complex bureaucracy and inefficient loss of tax revenue? If the beneficiary is meant to be the town that educated a person, why not run the system that way? (All that stuff is on record in Japan).

>The most desperate towns gain very little from this scheme because they don't have anything to offer.

If a town has nothing to offer, then why exactly does it need to continue to exist?

>If the goal was to transfer some of Tokyo's tax income to towns that need it more, why not just do that, without all the complex bureaucracy and inefficient loss of tax revenue?

Who gets to decide which towns need help, and which towns are left to wither and die? This way, regular people decide which towns actually have some appeal and send their money there. Towns that have no appeal can go by the wayside. Just because a town existed in the past doesn't mean it needs to continue to exist. The population is falling and people are moving to cities because it's more economically efficient and there's more opportunities there. These towns have outlived their usefulness.

The whole argument in favour of this policy was preserving those towns. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but in that case why have this transfer of tax money at all?

> This way, regular people decide which towns actually have some appeal and send their money there. Towns that have no appeal can go by the wayside.

People don't pick based on that "appeal" though. People pick based on what the "gift" is, so it's really just the towns that produce something people want to buy. But those towns were already doing fine!

Even if they did, the notion that people should get to decide how tax money is spent based on some woolly notion of which places they observe from afar are most "appealing" is highly questionable in my mind. Why should that be?

>but in that case why have this transfer of tax money at all?

To save some towns, I presume. Some places are probably worth saving; other places, not so much.

>But those towns were already doing fine!

Were they? They can probably use a little boost to help fund their schools or other infrastructure, to keep the towns worth living in for people.

>so it's really just the towns that produce something people want to buy

Sure, but why should a town that doesn't produce anything useful get any funding at all? Just because people lived in a place in the distant past doesn't mean people need to keep living there now. If it were really such a desirable place to live, people would be living there now, and there would be a functioning society, not just a bunch of stubborn elderly people waiting to die after all their kids and grandkids have moved to greener pastures.

> Were they? They can probably use a little boost to help fund their schools or other infrastructure, to keep the towns worth living in for people.

Everyone can find a use for more money, sure. But this was supposed to be a policy to help out the dying towns, not to give a boost to the top handful of non-Tokyo places.

> Sure, but why should a town that doesn't produce anything useful get any funding at all? Just because people lived in a place in the distant past doesn't mean people need to keep living there now.

Again, that contradicts the whole premise of this policy. If that's your thinking then why have the policy at all, why not just keep the money in Tokyo (which is after all where more people want to live)?

>If that's your thinking then why have the policy at all, why not just keep the money in Tokyo (which is after all where more people want to live)?

As I said before, my guess is that some places are worth saving, others not so much. The government here does have the goal of spreading the population out a bit more, because they're worried too many people are concentrated in just a few big cities, and a big disaster could be catastrophic for this reason. It does not follow that they want everyone to spread out equally across the whole country, or that every single small town needs to be saved.

If that’s the goal of the policy then it would make a lot more sense to develop second- or third-tier cities (Sapporo, for instance) and encourage people to set up businesses, live, and work there, not ship funds to dying little podunk towns.

Maybe, but the "podunk" towns are frequently where a lot of the produce comes from. I imagine no one is growing watermelons or tea in a second-tier city.

Besides, they are encouraging people to move to those second- and third-tier cities. There's various initiatives for that.

People grow produce around Haneda airport so your imagination may be flawed, but either way, an agricultural economy, while important in its own way, is not going to slow population loss to the cities.

> People grow produce around Haneda airport

No they don't. The part that's not ocean is an industrial wasteland; if you did manage to grow anything it would likely be too full of heavy metals to safely eat. You're probably thinking of Narita, which despite billing itself as "Tokyo" is 50km the other side of the prefectural border.

Not disagreeing (I'm sure you're right that he's thinking of NRT), but theoretically, you could grow stuff in an industrial wasteland without it being contaminated: you could build hydroponic facilities or some other buildings, ship clean soil in (for raised planting beds for instance), and grow things there. Just don't use the soil in the ground.

I imagine it's just not worth it to go to this trouble to grow things on contaminated former-industrial land.