You could say the same for Gates or the US. Or hell, Nigeria... 75m is < 0.3% of their annual government budget and < 0.02% of their annual GDP. The answer lie

You could say the same for Gates or the US. Or hell, Nigeria... 75m is < 0.3% of their annual government budget and < 0.02% of their annual GDP. The answer lies in that it's always a political struggle to appropriate tens of millions of dollars, even if it's a tiny fraction of the whole. Hell, if I ask most people in my apartment building about their attitudes towards us spending 100 million or 100 billion on helping a different country, virtually nobody will really answer much differently. That surprised me a lot, but people just register something in millions or billions as a 'big number', and are either for or against on the basis of their attitude towards things like international development, or their stereotypes of or cultural affinity with the recipient country. There's actually a lot of studies on people's perceptions on the amount that we give, and virtually all countries vastly overestimate (like, by an order of magnitude) the amount we give. It's not really a matter of numbers, it's just a matter of perceptions, they're political, knowing that it doesn't seem weird at all to me that Japanese officials can't simply get away with doing the right thing. It's really sad. [0] for example point 1: People are often under the impression that a lot more is spent on foreign aid than it actually is. The average guess of US citizens estimates is that around 31% of the Federal Budget is spent on aid. In fact the US spends less than 1% of the Federal Budget on foreign aid. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/myths-about-aid/#myth-1-we-already-spend-a-vast-amount-on-foreign-aid https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/myths-about-aid... And this has been found in studies in tons of western countries. It's pretty pathetic how wrong people get this if you think about it.