Hi! This is Ale reporting some changes to our company and to the fees.
As you might know, we have had a new member in our staff for some months. Katsura has been great at coordinating the program, maintaining our blog, and keeping in touch with you all.
Thanks to her, our transition to 6 residence slots per month has been smooth, and we have an even more international environment here at the studio. We are looking forward to the program getting better every year, as it happened this year with the air conditioning for all rooms, a number of reforms at the houses, etc.
In other news, Studio Kura is a company bigger than the residence program, and it has been some years since we have been obligated to pay the value-added tax for all of our income. We have not been collecting it so we were paying that 8% ourselves, and we were happy to work this way while we were able to work it out. However, we knew we would need to start passing this tax to our artists some day.
Just as our spaces have become more comfortable lately, our running costs per slot have gone up so we needed our fee to reflect that. That makes this the right time to start collecting the value-added tax from our resident artists.
The new fee will start to be applied for 2017 slots, and will be 74,074 JPY per four weeks, plus value-added tax which is currently 8% turning the fee into 80,000 JPY (tax included). The deposit will still be 10,000 JPY.
Fees going up seldom look good, but we are happy to be able to offer more comfort and a better service for little much, and we will keep striving to do our best on this budget.