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The story
The Hokkaido Community Chest, which runs the “Red Feather Community Chest” charity drive, has revealed a further ¥70 million in unaccounted-for funds. Combined with previously identified discrepancies, the total unaccounted-for funds now reportedly stand at ¥250 million. The charity held a press conference on measures to prevent a recurrence, but where the money actually went remains unclear. On 5ch, users voiced frustration over how donations are effectively collected as near-“forced levies” through neighborhood associations and workplaces, with many bringing up the lingering distrust left over from the past embezzlement scandal involving the 24-Hour TV telethon. The most common reaction: “I don’t even know what to trust anymore when it comes to donating.”
Regarding the unaccounted-funds scandal at the Hokkaido Community Chest, which operates the “Red Feather Community Chest,” the organization has disclosed a further ¥70 million in funds unaccounted for.
[LIVE] Red Feather Donations: Unaccounted Funds — Another ¥70 Million Revealed… Hokkaido Holds Press Conference on Prevention Measures
The total unaccounted-for funds are said to have reached ¥250 million.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
It's just "unaccounted for" — we don't actually know if it's criminal. There's a chance this just quietly fades away with nobody charged.
What do you mean "quietly fades away," lol
Money doesn't just evaporate.
They need to nail down whose account or pocket it ended up in.
Find whoever did this and make them pay it back.
They drag restaurants and kids into it and basically force people to pay.
The Red Feather campaign's collection network is abnormally deep-rooted to begin with — that's the real problem, especially since even how the money's used is vague. It's clearly different from a normal charity organization.
I donated ¥250 million. No receipt, but my gut remembers it (a joke claiming to single-handedly account for the entire missing sum).
You want your organs back too?
If you know the Seiyu supermarket that used to be in Sapporo, you're already in your 40s.
Thinking that donating money is where your responsibility ends is the wrong mindset to begin with.
For me, it was finding out staff had been stealing from the 24-Hour TV telethon donations — that's when I gave up on charity.
Mine gets forcibly collected right along with the neighborhood association fees too.
Is this only happening in Hokkaido? They should be investigating nationwide.
At my company, each section gets a quota — like "cough up ¥10,000."
Everyone does it, so why's Red Feather specifically being singled out, you got some grudge against them?
If the Olympics' missing funds get a pass, you people have no right to complain about Red Feather.
People who get caught doing something shady always conveniently ignore their own wrongdoing, huh.
The people running these charities do it so they can live large — of course they're not going to stop, lol.
The laws are lax too, so they don't even have to disclose detailed accounting.
These scumbags are literally just collecting money for themselves, lol.
All we can do is refuse to hand our money to scum like that.
Charity organizations were basically started so scumbags could live it up without working and run their political activities freely in the first place. "Good will" exists just to be devoured by bad people, you know?
But it's sneakily bundled into things like the neighborhood association fees, so there's no escaping it~
That's actually against the law, you know.
It is illegal, but apparently it ends up that way because collecting it any other way is a hassle and wouldn't be "fair."
They should just stop collecting it altogether. If I ever became neighborhood association president, I'd scrap it immediately.
Ours got rid of it and switched to just handing out donation flyers instead.
That's not a donation, that's a tax.
Seems like there are municipalities where the Akahata (the Japanese Communist Party's "Red Flag" newspaper subscription) is basically mandatory too.
Mine collects it at the municipal level too — might change starting next year, but it's several tens of thousands of yen a year, so it's not exactly pocket change.
Background and Key Points on This Topic
The “Red Feather Community Chest” is a fundraising campaign affiliated with the National Council of Social Welfare, and the practice of door-to-door collection through neighborhood associations and workplaces is deeply entrenched across the country — it has often been pointed out that in some areas this amounts to de facto semi-compulsory collection. It’s worth noting that this particular press conference was held solely by the Hokkaido Community Chest, and the article doesn’t indicate whether similar problems exist at chapters in other prefectures. It also hasn’t been made clear at this point whether the unaccounted funds stem from embezzlement or accounting errors, or whether police have opened an investigation. On the forum, most comments focus on frustration with the collection methods themselves and references to the past embezzlement scandal involving the 24-Hour TV telethon donations — suggesting that scandals at individual organizations are feeding broader distrust of charitable giving in general. One point readers may easily conflate: the “Red Feather Community Chest” is a separate organization from the Japanese Red Cross Society and the 24-Hour TV telethon, and this scandal doesn’t directly implicate them.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[Breaking] Another ¥70 Million Missing — “Red Feather” Charity Reveals Total Unaccounted Funds Now ¥250 Million.”
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