Hureai kippu (a rough English translation: Caring Relationship Tickets) is a Japanese community currency created in 1995 by the Japanese Welfare Institute so that people could earn credits helping seniors in their community.

The basic unit of account is the hour of service to an elderly person.

Sometimes seniors help each other and earn the credits, other times family members in other communities earn credits and transfer them to their parents who live elsewhere.

An immediate application to explain the credit awards: You have an elderly woman on your block who no longer has a driver’s license. If you shop for her, you get credit for that, based on the kind of service and the number of hours.

Those credits accumulate in an account. Users may keep them for when they become sick or elderly themselves, then use the credits in exchange for services. Alternatively, the users may transfer credits to someone else.

A surprising part of the project has been that the elderly tend to prefer the services provided by people paid in Hureai Kippu over those paid in yen. This may be due to the personal connection developed between users of the currency.

There are two clearinghouses that are set up in Japan whose purpose is to send the credits from one side of the country to the other.

The Hureai kippu solution makes more sense from an economic point of view as well as a human point of view. When they surveyed the elderly, it was clear they preferred the people who worked for hureai kippu over the people who worked for yen — because the relationships are different. To convert this community service to yen would be seen to dilute the community ethic of relationship that it produces.

China, too, is starting to implement the hureai kippu concept. By the end of 2004 or sometime in 2005, the largest complementary currency system in the world is going to be in China.