This is a CTP of initiative: Volunteer Labour Bank/Network (Japan)
This CTP concerns the emergence of the Nippon Active Life Club (NALC), which is a specific kind of TimeBank addressed to the challenges of an aging society. NALC was established in 1994; i.e. already two decades after the establishment of VLB/VLN. The idea of its founder, Keiichi Takahata, was to enable retirees to form interpersonal relations and mutual support groups for an active retirement. These were formed as TimeBanks.
Mizushima, the inventor of TimeBanking and founder of VLB/VLN had been decades ahead of everyone else in Japan in her assessment of aging. Her TimeBank offered mutual-help opportunities especially for housewives and, as part of this, provided relief-care opportunities for women otherwise housebound when caring for aged kin. VLB/VLN focused on female carers as needing support, which was organised through mutual aid delivered using the mechanism of time exchange.
The primary focus of VLB/VLN concern was to improve the lives of women carers.
By contrast, the NALC shifted the focus of attention and concern onto the aged. It also sought to change the perception of older Japanese from people ‘in need of help’ to people also ‘able to offer help’. This was achieved by distinguishing the active elderly from the frail elderly. NALC recruited a predominantly male membership of active retirees into TimeBanking and care support work and created new forms of organizing.
Whereas VLB/VLN operated largely within the framework of traditional Japanese societal norms (i.e. care undertaken in the home by women kinfolk) and did not challenge these, NALC was contributory to changing and challenging those norms. The Japanese Care System Association (JCSA) had already challenged tradition by extending care in the home to non-kin carers. But these were middle-aged women. NALC engaged the active elderly – and especially men – in community-based care for the fragile elderly.
While NALC uses the TimeBanking mechanism of time exchange, it is more flexible than ‘purist’ TimeBanks. It operates a point system for hours of service with points per hour varying according to the kind of service provided. Individuals wanting NALC services but not having points to offer can instead contribute financially per hour of received service. Payments are made to the TimeBank (not to the member of the TimeBank who is providing service) and contribute to defraying the money costs of the TimeBank, especially brokering and organising costs.
The possibility of payment for services was introduced (as it was also by the JCSA) partly to stimulate effective demand for services as, when the NALC first began operating, the frail elderly had no time points; i.e. the possibility to pay for services was to a pump-priming measure to start-up the intergenerational mechanism of vertical person-to-person exchanges, which (later) were anticipated would operate on a higher component of using banked time points in exchange for services. It was also acknowledging the stigma in Japanese society that attaches to accepting charity. Payment for services (even if only at a token level) removed the stigma of charity, making the transaction one of reciprocity (giving and receiving).
While NALC operates a multi-currency version of TimeBanking, time points cannot be exchanged for money and their use is limited to the person earning them and their immediate family members (spouse, parents or non-adult children). Members can also donate points back to their TimeBank, which can give these to others in need.
The bulk of NALC members are retirees or people in late middle-age nearing retirement. However, since 2000 the NALC has also targeted younger and middle aged people, which is needed to ensure long-term survival of the organisation by bringing in new recruits and to raise the level of volunteering in Japanese society overall. In addition to elderly care, NALC also supports child care as a way to help deal with the declining birth rate by enabling mothers to return to work.
One of the major ways NALC has acted as a catalyst in Japanese society since its founding has been as a promoter of men and non-kin as carers. Acknowledgement that men can become carers can be said to represent a fundamental shift in the way male and female roles are viewed in Japan and challenged societal norms. While the burden of caring for the elderly traditionally has been seen as the domain of women, this position has been changing slowly since the 1990s due to the pressures of social change: population aging and growing female workforce participation mean more aged people need care, but fewer women are at home to provide care. NALC has made it more acceptable for men and non-kin to become carers and experimented with this new way of organizing care.
The transformative influence of NALC on Japanese society is therefore different from that of VLB/VLN or the Japanese Care System Association (JCSA). The VLB/VLN improved the opportunities and lifestyles of women carers, leaving caring for the aged still as a family responsibility. The JCSA paved the way for non-kin carers from the community (still middle-aged women) to provide care for the elderly living at home alone and otherwise unsupported or inadequately supported. The NALC, however, supports more active lifestyles for mostly male retirees as carers and brought a new labour resource (the active elderly) into elderly care, which helped ensure affordable and universal elderly care as a community responsibility, rather than as a family responsibility and allowed the participants to develop additional competences.
A network of NALC TimeBanks grew up across Japan. Albeit coming later onto the Japanese TimeBanking scene than VLB/VLN, the NALC quite soon overtook the pioneer TimeBanks and became, for a while, the dominant form of TimeBanking in Japan. Like the JCSA, the NALC practised mixed-currency operations. Interestingly, although the NALC ‘model’ is widely described as ’the’ model of contemporary Japanese TimeBanking it is not currently the dominant form. Rather, the variants offering some money payment to carers are dominant.
NALC was founded by Keiichi Takahata in 1994 upon his retirement. Until then he had followed a typical male pattern career path of lifelong employment with a major Japanese corporation. For 20 years he had headed the company labour union at Matsushita Electric. Thereafter, he was a Director and Executive Director of the company. He followed and was inspired by the principles and values of the founder of the Matsushita Electric company, who argued that manufacturing companies have a social responsibility to relieve poverty and create welfare for their society, and not only create profit for shareholders.
Matsushita had, himself, founded the ‘Peace and Happiness through Prosperity’ (PHP) Institute in 1946. Its mission was “to nourish a philosophically positive approach to life that goes beyond materialism to question how to live more fully.” The magazines, books and other publications of PHP became conduits for disseminating information about NALC, which had a similar mission to promote a positive life, in this case by promoting an active retirement.
Takahata’s ambition to establish an organisation dated back to the 1980s, but he delayed its establishment until he retired. His aim was to recruit middle-aged and older men into active volunteering by establishing mutual self-help networks. The direct inspiration for founding NALC came from the US, where Takahata had been temporarily posted for a work assignment and where he encountered the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). Takahata was impressed by the size of AARP membership and its power to lobby and influence government policy. He felt a similar organisation in Japan could help promote the rights and interests of older people. He was also inspired by the AARP approach and advocacy of productive aging and volunteering by the aged.
There were nevertheless design differences between AARP and NALC. Takahata preferred a model with no paid staff or lobbyists; everyone was to be unpaid. He therefore focused on interpersonal relations and the idea of mutual help. Takahata consulted his union-leader contacts for comment on his ideas. They were generally critical of his intention to make aged-care a key feature for his ideas about a positive and active retirement, which they felt would repel rather than attract members. Takahata therefore sought advice from Naoki Tanaka, then head of an organisation with a related mission in Japan to help older people, WAC (Wonderful Aging Club).
Tanaka alerted Takahata to the US model of TimeBanking (time dollars) promoted by Edgar Cahn, whose model incorporated unpaid exchange, but also the idea that time could be accumulated not only by an individual for own benefit, but also to benefit another person and, in particular, an aging parent. Tanaka felt such a system could attract members and that the prolonged commitment of members it requires would help assure long-term sustainability.
Another influence was Yuzo Okamato – a medical practitioner, lecturer and advisor of government committees in respect to systems for aged care. As an expert on welfare systems, Okamato had researched Denmark, which was considered then to have the most advanced welfare state model for the aged. At this time, the Danish model was promoted as the one to inform and guide Japanese proponents of reform of elderly care. Within the national government, the Ministry of Health and Welfare was, meanwhile, putting together the basics for the Gold Plan. The Gold Plan (1989) envisaged a new role for certified carers in supporting the elderly living at home. New qualifications had been brought in by the government a few years earlier to give a major boost to carer numbers. Through contact with officials Takahata received copies of these plans, which provided him with additional insight into policymakers’ thinking about elderly care and influenced his ideas about providing training for carers as well as opportunities for caring.
The next step was to prepare for the actual establishment of the organisation. Takahata was supported by Tanaka and WAC. WAC up-fronted help with production of documents (such as association rules, policies, guidance manuals etc.), preparing publicity materials, and meeting printing costs. Tanaka offered that the new association could begin life as a section of WAC to help it through the start-up phase. Takahata’s association was therefore named initially the WAC Active Club, until the group became incorporated officially as a civic society organisation in its own right as the Nippon Active Life Club (NALC) following the passing of the Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) Law.
Takahata was also able to draw on connections he had made during his working life both within his former company and throughout corporate Japan, He drew on long-established loyalty ties to help build up his organisation. He solicited legitimation and endorsement from personal contacts and won their support in publicising his initiative and recruiting members. His contacts included reporters he had liaised with during his time as Union Leader. Many had since become section heads in newspapers, TV stations, etc. At the time of launching his organisation in April 1994, all the major Japanese newspapers carried articles about it. Soon after the group started it had 700 recruits from all around Japan.
NALC was formed when population aging was portrayed in the media and by national government figures as posing an impending catastrophe for a Japan suffering also from economic recession. The recession led to more people (mainly men) being released from paid employment earlier than was then usual. In the process men were losing purpose and their employment-based social networks. They could also expect to live longer. By the mid-1990s, average life expectancy in Japan had risen to 80 (from 50 in the immediate post-war years). At this time of great social upheaval and pressure, NALC espoused a new image for older Japanese and particularly men. It sought to break down stereotypes about aging and demonstrate how older people can retain control over their own lives and contribute to the community.
Important related events include the passage of several context-changing pieces of legislation: the Gold Plan (1989) and (in the early 2000s) the NPO Law and the Long-Term Care Insurance Scheme. These are the subject of related CTPs. These (and related developments) provided the policy, regulatory and financial frameworks to change the context for welfare delivery in Japan, enabling a greater role to be played by the community through mutual aid networks and ‘incentivised volunteers’.
The Gold Plan, introduced in 1989, was important to the emergence of NALC. It was the first major response of government to the challenge of an aging society. This was a decade-long plan to ease the burden of elder care on women and to begin to shift the burden of care from family and onto government and society more widely. Targets were set under the Gold Plan to increase the numbers of carers, introduce training, professional qualifications and certification schemes for carers, and provide day-care facilities for the elderly. This first ‘solution’ of a public scheme with professional carers proved able only to deliver care to those most in need and was too costly to generalise. The LTCI scheme that later replaced (2000/01) it took a completely different approach; i.e. universal coverage funded partly by taxes and partly by insurance contributions paid by individuals in advance of needing care (i.e. compulsory insurance for those aged 40+) and drawing on the wider community – including the middle-aged and active elderly (both men and women) – as carers.
The Kobe earthquake (17/01/1995) and media coverage of it were important, because they spotlighted the role of community organisations in providing relief services. Government responses to the earthquake were seen (or portrayed) as slow and inept, in contrast with those of voluntary organisations. NALC was among the groups to which media and public attention was drawn by the earthquake. In the 2 years after the earthquake, 4,500 NALC members contributed 20,000 hours of their time to assist recovery work. Ensuing publicity attracted recruits to the NALC.
The major contestation surrounded the feasibility of (largely) male volunteers assuming carer roles and their being accepted by the elderly and their families into their homes. The public image of aged care was very poor and there was concern among those who Takahata consulted about his plans that this would discourage people from joining the organisation. Nevertheless, demographic change was already leading to changes in societal attitudes, offering some readiness to consider men as carers due to worries about a declining workforce and birth rate at the same time as the baby-boomer generation was reaching retirement age.
In order to obtain qualifications and experience and to demonstrate men could be involved in care work Takahata himself undertook certification courses for carers, for which half the curriculum was devoted to practical work. His example and status gave legitimacy to the membership. This also equipped him to address the questions and concerns of those who challenged his ideas. He held to the goals of engaging older Japanese with society, drawing on their skills, qualifications and capacities. Aged-care became the pivotal undertaking for his organisation. He set the aim of building a nationwide network of local branches. In this regard, he shared a similar vision to that of Mizushima of VLB/VLN and was able to fulfil and sustain his network even as that of the VLB/VLN began to decline.
The demographic change of an aging society had been anticipated already by Mizushima four decades earlier. By the time of Takahata’s initiative, however, population aging was no longer a far-off challenge, but a current reality and finding additional and new ways to address it was at the top of the government agenda. From the outset, Takahata’s initiative was designed so that it would be able to play into developing government policies. This approach was continued after NALC establishment and was an important element of its success.
NALC collaborated actively with government on policies to draw on the potential for community contributions offered by the large numbers of active and healthy Japanese retirees; for example, when the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare announced new carer qualifications under the LTLI scheme as a measure to boost carer numbers in response to projected shortfalls, NALC stepped in to fill the gap by recruiting retirees and running its own training and certification courses for carers.
The LTLI scheme distinguishes different care needs and different carer roles. The approach of the NALC has been to deliver components of care that can be provided by anyone with simple training. NALC therefore complements or plays supporting roles in elderly care to those played by professionals. Importantly, it has been found that 70% of the care needs of the housebound elderly are relatively simple tasks, such as household cleaning, shopping, transport, and food preparation that can be undertaken after only first-level training and certification.
NALC also works with regional authorities to promote stronger communities that can enhance the response to the aging society.
NALC operates around a set of core values or principles. These are codified and reproduced in NALC literature. English language translations of these are imprecise, because of the specific connotations certain words hold in Japanese society. Broadly, they translate to: self-help, mutual-help, ‘finding meaning’ or achieving a ‘worthy’ life, and volunteering. They are considered to represent a blend/hybrid between traditional Japanese values (loyalty, service, worthiness) and new values (volunteering, setting new aims).
The NALC developed a website with a section of instructions on setting up a new branch, based on learning from earlier experiences. Help is offered from the Head Office. New branches are formed by newcomers or from within an existing branch if there are enough members prepared to establish and move to the new group (ca. 20). NALC recognises the crucial role played by branch coordinators and runs training courses for them.
NALC undertakes surveys and research and produces reports and publications relevant to aging. It researches into the lives and needs of middle-aged and older Japanese. It has established social welfare survey centres around Japan that undertake consultancy work for government bodies and companies that cater to the needs of older people. These aim to monitor lifestyle satisfaction of the aged and those suffering from dementia in the different regions.
The NALC has gradually established itself as a leading authority on the life styles of older Japanese.
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