Jichitai Tokusen Store (自治体特選ストア)

» see japan-sg.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The proposition was that a Japanese town could run its own shop on the internet. Takeo City in Saga Prefecture opened the first one on 7 November 2011 under the name FB良品, selling local produce directly. Over the next three years more than twenty other municipalities bought into the same platform. It changed names twice along the way. It became JAPANsg in September 2013, then moved onto Yahoo! Shopping as 自治体特選ストア in October 2014.

Joining cost two million yen up front and a hundred and fifty thousand yen a month. What came back the other way is documented unusually well, because the towns involved were public bodies and had to answer for the money in front of their own assemblies. Those assembly answers are the whole record, and they are consistent in a way that press coverage never is.

By March 2018 four contracting bodies remained of the twenty-two that had been members at the end of 2014. They had voted the previous January to dissolve the council and close the store. The storefront went dark on 29 March and the contracts expired on the 31st, the last day of the fiscal year. The closing notice gave no reason at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the letters stood for ~

Almost everyone assumes FB meant Facebook, and for a while the assumption had some support, since until December 2012 you needed a Facebook account to buy anything. It stood for Fun and Buy. The project's own banner spelled it out in Japanese, inviting you to love your region and cheerfully get hold of good things, with the two English words set in brackets inside the sentence. Takeo's mayor had taken the 良品 half from Muji.

That mayor, Keisuke Hiwatashi, registered the trademark personally. Asked about it directly in the Takeo assembly in September 2013, he confirmed it in one word, 「事実です」, that is correct. He explained that he had been chairman of the holding arrangement at the time and that the launch had been in a considerable hurry. The scheme ran through two separate vehicles that are easy to confuse: a corporate alliance that signed the contracts, and a members' council of the municipalities themselves, which he also chaired.

~ what the towns actually sold ~

Tachiarai in Fukuoka opened on 25 July 2012. By 12 December it had shipped 133 items for about 420,000 yen, and a council member pointed out in the same session that maintenance over those five months had cost 750,000 yen. The town had spent roughly two million yen on the initial build. Asked what the sales target was, the answer was that no specific target had ever been set.

Kurate, also in Fukuoka, ran its store for one year and four months and took about 200,000 yen in total against annual costs approaching two million. Ishigaki in Okinawa put the arithmetic in front of an external review board, which compared two million yen of annual operating cost against just under 200,000 yen of sales for April to December and recommended that the component be abolished. The reviewers added that the money would do more good somewhere else.

~ the spreadsheet that divided by zero ~

Ishigaki's own performance table holds the sharpest version of this. The city tracked two indicators for the project, site accesses and sales, and for two consecutive fiscal years it entered zero against both. The achievement-rate column divides the result by the target, and the spreadsheet could not complete that division, so the cell printed its error text where a percentage should have been. A municipal evaluation document, published and archived, with #DIV/0! sitting in it where the performance of a government e-commerce program was supposed to go.

One town got something out of it. Nanto in Toyama built its own replacement after the council dissolved, a single-city shop called 南砺の逸品, and that one is still trading today. The shared domain did worse: japan-sg.jp was picked up by somebody else and now serves a page dressed as the old site with online casino links in it.

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