This is a CTP of initiative: Volunteer Labour Bank/Network (Japan)
This CTP concerns the death of Mizushima, the originator of time banking and the founder of the Volunteer Labour Bank (VLB), which later became incorporated as the Volunteer Labour Network (VLN).
Mizushima is important as the first originator of the idea of time banks. She first wrote up her ideas about TimeBanks, which she called Labour Banks, in 1950 in the context of a newspaper competition soliciting innovative ideas from women. Mizushima’s wrote a prize-winning article on her Labour Bank ideas.
“Mizushima was both a forward thinker and a reflection of her age.”. She developed the foundational ideas of time banking during WWII and the Period of Occupation. She envisaged time banking as a form of social exchange to enable people to give and receive care over the life course in ways that could aid, particularly, women.
It was Mizushima who first formulated the concept of time banking, setting out underlying values and principles and establishing the time exchange mechanism. She also conceptualised and theorized time as a community currency. She explored time exchange in relation to capitalism and communism as the (then two) mainstream economic systems, pointing to weaknesses in both of these from a welfare and social security perspective and advocating for the relative strengths of time exchange over money exchange in building relationships of trust for handling the intergenerational challenges of, especially, caring for the young and the aged.
Especially, she articulated the advantages of time over money and of social capital over financial capital in providing for social security. These were major intellectual contributions, for which she was widely recognised during her lifetime in Japan where she achieved popular recognition as an authoritative social commentator.
Mizushima was important, also, because she was among the first social commentators to pre-empt the societal challenges of socio-economic and demographic change and because of her search for innovative solutions to women’s issues and issues of aging. She flagged up the aging issue decades before problems of aging became more widely apparent in Japan. She was “among the earliest social commentators to realise that Japanese society would be greatly changed by rapid aging of the population and that individuals would need to plan for their futures in a context where the majority could, for the first time, anticipate living well past retirement age.”.
As a charismatic and well-known personality in Japan, Mizushima played an important role in building up VLB/VLN as the world’s first nationwide network of time banks. Her personality and prominence helped attract new recruits to her network as organisers and members of local time banks.
Her sudden and unexpected death in September 1996 (from a heart attack) therefore constituted a serious loss to the organisation. After her death, some projects that were in the planning phase at the time of her death were shelved, including blueprints for projects of joint housing for the aged.
Mizushima was succeeded at VLB/VLN by Noriko Moriwaki. The group became a registered NPO, following the passing of the NPO laws. The new legal status required a change of name from Volunteer Labour Bank (VLB) to Volunteer Labour Network (VLN). Consultations were held with Tsutomo Hotta over incorporation. Hotta was influential in the process leading to the NPO Laws.
VLN opened a new Head Office in Osaka in 2005, which demonstrates that the civil society organisation was still viable financially even with a reduced and aging membership. VLB/VLN was able initially to sustain its nationwide network after Mizushima passed away. It still had 125 local time banks some 10 years after her death. Nevertheless, overall membership of the VLB/VLN dropped for the first time and the average membership of individual time banks fell. Membership had peaked in the years prior to her death at over 4000. Following her death membership declined. By 2006 (10 years after her death) membership of the VLN had fallen to below 1000 members. Membership currently (end-2016) is around 500. These are mostly elderly women who are longstanding members of their TimeBanks. The annual activity level is now very low – around 1000 exchange hours.
The fall in membership and the aging of the remaining members in the period after Mizushima’s death caused concern over the long-term sustainability of the organisation. Decline in the number of time banks and in the membership of individual time banks undermines the mutual social security that the timebanking model and mechanism can offer, reducing its attractiveness and utility to prospective and existing members.
Any decline in new recruitment is significant because the mutual-support benefits in old age to members of a ‘purist’ model of timebanking (as practised by VLB/VLN), depend on the capacity for time banks and their memberships to sustain over time by attracting new active members. Continuing to recruit is important for the age structure within the overall time bank. This holds especially when members bank time to draw on for support in old age.
If not countered, failure to recruit new members becomes self-reinforcing, since it generates a damaging feedback cycle between declining membership, an aging membership, and an inability to deliver the intergenerational security through mutuality and interdependence that the model promises and that is an important benefit and motive for recruits.
The major impact of Mizushima’s sudden death was the loss to her organisation of her leadership, charisma, and innovativeness at a time when continuing innovation was most needed to ensure the organisation’s relevance in a rapidly-changing and increasingly- challenging Japanese context. By maintaining timebanking in the image its founder, the VLB/VLN lost ground to new competitors. It lost its leadership position and the organisation has declined gradually over the 20 years since her death through attrition of established members and difficulty in recruiting new members.
Many factors alongside the premature death of Mizushima contributed to the stagnation and decline of VLB/VLN on the overall Japanese time banking scene even in the context of the overall growth and mainstreaming of TimeBanking in Japan.
The changing socio-economic and demographic context changed the nature of the challenges facing Japanese society and the nature of the needed solutions. Dramatic social change was driven by pressures caused, especially, by economic recession and the arrival of the baby boom cohort to retirement age around the mid-1990s. New welfare arrangements were established through the Gold Plan in 1989 and, later, through the Long-Term Life Insurance scheme from 2001. New legal provisions were made to support volunteer organisations (NPO Laws).
New forms of timebanking emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. The Japanese Care System Association (JCSA) was established in 1982 to address challenges of caring for the elderly. It adopted the TimeBanking mechanism in order to help with its mission. The next significant development was a decision by the JCSA to break from the purist principles of timebanking and enable care recipients to contribute financially for care received (as most of those needing care had no time credits) and to enable carers to be rewarded in a combination of time and money currencies.
But competition was not restricted only to time banks offering money inducements to incentivise membership and contributions. Another timebanking network, the Nippon Active Life Club (NALC) emerged, providing opportunities for newly retired and soon-to-retire men to become active in timebanking, offering them new social networks and new roles in society as carers. The new model was one of active elderly males supporting the frail elderly.
The decade-long Gold Plan scheme that operated from 1989 created a facilitating context for the emergence of TimeBanks and TimeBanking networks dedicated to providing elderly care. The Plan set targets for increasing the number of carers and the number of care institutions and created opportunities for ‘incentivised volunteers’ to provide elderly care.
These new Time Banks responded better than VLB/VLN to the changing context and opportunities. They took advantage of new financial streams that legal, regulatory and budgetary policy reforms had introduced.
The combination of the loss of a charismatic and innovative leader, the emergence of new opportunities, and the introduction of new timebanking models and networks on the Japanese timebanking scene created a more challenging context for the VLN to which it was unable to respond effectively.
Policymakers were important actors in changing the framing conditions for volunteering and in creating new opportunities for harnessing social innovation organisations in welfare delivery. The Japanese press and media played important roles in criticising the inadequacies of formal governmental responses to challenges facing Japanese society, while drawing attention to the (absolutely and relatively) better response of civil society, supporting legitimation of volunteers and better treatment of civil society (non-profit) organisations (NPOs).
New social innovators emerged on the scene, offering new models and ways of using time banking.
Together with a changing socio-economic and demographic outlook, these changed the playing field, the rules of the game and the players in Japanese TimeBanking in the period after 1982. Adhering to the original pure form of TimeBanking, the VLB/VLN was less able to compete for members as the context changed.
By the 1990s and 2000s, the context was more suited for a different approach. Whereas VLN focused on women as carers and their need for mutual support in their mission and motivation of caring for the frail elderly, the newer time banks focused directly on older people. Crucially, they distinguished between the active elderly as able to give help (including males) and the frail elderly. This paved the way for a new approach of recruiting many more people into TimeBanking as carers, including retirees, and harnessing the active elderly to support the frail elderly.
Similarly, the need for TimeBanking on the VLB/VLN model became less evident with the passage of the Gold Plan, including (importantly) to the established membership. Many established members left the VLN Time Banks believing that these were no longer needed once the Gold Plan was passed. This was a false perception, since the Gold Plan proved untenable, but by then VLN was already weakened. This was a negative side effect of the Gold Plan.
When Mizushima introduced TimeBanking her first idea was to support working women by organising mutual aid around child care. There was no ‘contestation’, but neither was there take-up. There was no great unmet demand among working women at the time in society for childcare through mutual aid, as working women could afford to pay for child care. By contrast, there was a pent-up demand for care relief among women looking after elderly kin, as they were typically unable to work, so could not afford relief cover, but could address this through mutual aid.
Mizushima’s death was sudden and unexpected. In terms of internal decision making, there had been no contingency planning, so the VLB she left faced abrupt change; i.e. the loss of strong leadership at a time when the context was changing rapidly, the existing ‘model’ was under stress and required further innovation to keep it relevant, and strong leadership was needed to guide the VLB/VLN into a new phase of development.
Learning by experience and by observation but also by systematic research involving experimentation and monitoring was integral to Mizushima’s approach to problem solving and innovation. For example, having observed low attendance rates by mothers at meetings of the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) of the school her own children attended, she conducted research into the underlying causes, establishing that fear of leaving the house and aged relatives unattended were prominent reasons for the observed behaviour, leading her to explore ways of organising interpersonal relations for mutual help to free mothers up. She used her own household to research into how time could be used more efficiently. Over a 22 year period before she established VLB/VLN she conducted a regular annual survey of her own family's use of time across a one month period, tabulating each person’s activities, use of time and whether that use of time was ‘worthwhile’ in relation to indicators of the family’s situation (health, psychological wellbeing, financial situation, etc.).
Mizushima left a legacy of scholarly writing and research. She established support systems for setting up new Time Banks within her network. She used newsletters as means to promote learning within her networks. She was an effective communicator of the TimeBanking concept within Japan. With the exception of helping to establish a Time Bank among Japanese Americans living in California (Gardena) in 1982/3 her influence beyond Japan was limited within her lifetime. Her work has only come to the attention of western countries since her death, most notably through the research of Jill Miller. Mizushima’s contributions as the originator of the timebanking concept and founder of the first time bank and first national timebanking network are, however, increasingly now known and acknowledged internationally.
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