The Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications on Monday announced the launch of a new lottery, the proceeds of which are to be distributed among local governments to be used to finance revitalization projects.
The ministry told a meeting of general affairs section heads from Japan's 47 prefectures that tickets for the new lottery will go on sale between late September and early October.
One ticket will cost 300 yen, and about 8 billion yen in anticipated proceeds will be shared between the municipalities of each prefecture, based on their population. Each city, town and village is expected to receive several million yen, ministry officials said.
The ministry, which has yet to decide a name and amount of prize money for the new lottery, plans to increase the availability of the tickets according to demand.
Various public lottery tickets are now exclusively sold by the 47 prefectures and 12 major cities of Japan. Currently, only the proceeds of the Summer Jumbo Lottery are distributed to each of the local governments.
Entire sales of lottery tickets totaled some 920 billion yen in fiscal 1999, which ended in March last year, but sales of summer jumbo tickets have leveled off, and their proportion of the total has been shrinking recently, the officials said.