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Last updated: 28 March 2008, 11:00 GMT

About us

Actually this website is currently maintained by "Miguel" Yasuyuki Hirota, a Japanese researcher of complementary currency systems since 1999, so it would be correct to say "about me" instead of "about us." Miguel was born in 1976 in Fukuoka, Japan and was studying different languages, especially Spanish and English, when he came to know the key concepts of complementary currency systems, although this shift of his interest didn't deprive him of the eagerness (on the contrary, it was furthermore increased) to master more languages. Since then he's been researching different systems all over the world, keeping in touch with what is going on in this field as much as possible. You can contact him in any of the languages used in this website (English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish), although he admits he isn't good at oral communication in German and Korean.

As there are already quite a few excellent websites on complementary currencies (both theory and practices), this website aims at providing the most fundamental information on this movement (as it takes much more time to prepare the same contents in as many as 7 languages!). His dream is to enlarge this website (probably he'll change its name when he found it appropriate to do so), allowing people to learn each other without feeling the language barrier.

Another topic he's interested in is the democratisation of our economic system (click here to read his blog, although it's updated little often), because he believes that quite a few miseries in our world today stem from the very fact that our economic system is far from being democratically managed. He regards social economy (or solidarity economy in some countries, such as cooperatives, non-profits and fair trade) as a good alternative to the current domineering regime, always hoping to introduce complementary currency systems as a tool to encourage such economic activities.