Nearly four years have passed since we found our perfect piece of land in Sasayama, which will become our future 'state of the art', shelter, sanctuary and animal welfare education facility. Many of you have contributed generously to this plan and reasonably you need to know how your donations have been used and when animals can benefit from this.

Before any buildings can be constructed, we have to go though a process of planning, which in Japan, with strict regulations for fire, earthquakes and floods, are very tight and require endless bureaucratic processing to be given the green light to go ahead. So as you can see from the accounts below, a lot of money has already been used to get permission for building and to get the basics in place. Without unseen, underground amenities, like electricity, water, sewerage and drainage, building itself, cannot start. The warehouse, already up, is the first building.

Even if we put up a building for cats or dogs, we need facilities for people who can care for these animals. We cannot just leave animals by themselves, without people to care for them, day and night. Although we would like to go ahead with animal housing on the scale originally envisaged, we understand that within our budget, we have to lower our expectations and reduce the original plan.

We are therefore planning half of the original dog kennels for a start, and a three person team will visit a factory in the UK, which specializes in dog kenneling to see if we can import kenneling sections for this. We should be able to provide 25 kennels for this. Depending on dogs and whether they get along with others, we should be able to provide space for 50+ dogs. Our priority is on housing the remaining 16 dogs from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, many of whom have owners, but who are unable to take them back. For this reason we are planning to use part of the Big Scale Rescue Fund (Daikibo Rescue Fund) for this new kennel building. The area (land) where the Earthquake dogs are now housed, has been rented for many years but now due to changing circumstances of the owners, is due to be returned to them. That means there is some urgency in building new kennels for them in Sasayama. Part of the Daikibo Rescue Fund came from donations to Earthquake animals, so we ask for your understanding in the use of these funds for this purpose.

Water: we need to drill a new well. After that we can sort out the sewage system for humans. (Animals have to have a separate, expensive, sewage system of their own.) We plan to use solar energy for hot water, expensive to install but cheaper in the long run.

Electricity: our consumption of electricity is likely to be high given that the animal housing will have under-floor heating. So the plan is to use LED (light-emitting diode) system - again, expensive to install, but it will reduce electricity running costs by 80%. It is also environmentally friendly. To save further electricity costs we will use natural light with skylights where possible.

Absolutely basic: but with this in place, we can avoid road repairs later.

...and start to use the site. These building will be the Warehouse, Staff facility and one more building. We would like to be able to get some animals on site. The cost of the kennels and catteries, and the associated animals sewage systems is huge - we can't start them until we have funds in place. 

Milestone: Possibly the Isolation Facility : First animals on site, we hope - used for cats initially.

We will probably start by using the Staff Facility as a clinic - all buildings will be multipurpose in the short term

Staff will continue to live in their current accommodation - which is about 40 minutes from Sasayama….

Fundraising for Kennels and Catteries.

Complete Kennels and Catteries. These are very expensive and we don't have funds for them yet. Cat pens must be aluminium, dog pens must be stainless steel. All must have heating.

Build main reception and Clinic, Offices, Guest Reception, Cafe, Landscaping