According to the Mainichi Shimbun, as of May 13, the holders of seven winning ¥100 million lottery tickets that were sold last year for the Dream Jumbo Takarakuji have yet to claim their prizes, and if they don't claim them by June 17 the tickets will become void. The media is cooperating by actually printing the names of the locations where the seven tickets were purchased in an effort to jog the memories of people who may have bought them but for reasons unknown have forgotten all about it. Being a responsible social medium, we here reprint these locations in the unlikely event that one or more of our readers happens to belong to this select group: The Koriyama branch of Mizuho Bank in Fukushima Prefecture; the TFC Kita Asaka TK Shop in Saitama City; the Nishi Ginza Chance Center and the Yotsuya Dream Center in Tokyo; the Hiratsuka branch of Mizuho Bank and the Yokohama Porta Chance Center in Kanagawa Prefecture; and the Tenmonkan Chance Center in Kagoshima Prefecture. To check the details and the winning numbers (in Japanese only), go here. The site also includes information about unclaimed prizes from more recent lotteries.
This is not, apparently, an unusual development. Since 2009, ¥20.1 billion worth of winning lottery tickets have become void because their holders did not redeem them by the deadline, which is one calendar year after the winning numbers are selected by computer. Included in this loot are 25 tickets that were worth at least ¥100 million. Since Takarakuji lotteries do not carry over, the money becomes the property of whichever local government presides over the place where the winning ticket was sold, so it's not as if the money becames a complete waste. The free media publicity may have another purpose. Sales of Takarakuji have been dropping steadily for the last few years and the operators want to keep awareness of the lottery alive. In fact, the failure of some lottery buyers to check their tickets for winning numbers could be considered a symptom of the game's loss of cultural topicality. As with the squirrel that works hard to hoard nuts for the winter and then forgets where it hid them, all the excitement is in the acquisition.