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Minimata disease first appeared in the 1960s when the residents of Kyushu suffered terrible pains after eating fish caught in local waters. The fish were contaminated by waste from the local chemical industry, and contained high levels of organic mercury. Japanese housewives felt that this threat to their families' health constituted a call to action. They began to protest industrial pollution, and organized consumers' cooperatives in order to provide safe food and a safe environment to their families. The Seikatsu Club Consumers' Cooperative (SCCC) is one of these cooperatives. Its objective is to create an alternative to overindustrialized society.
Most of the 170,000 members of the Seikatsu Club are ordinary housewives who are responsible for the day-to-day operation of their households. The role of the housewife in Japanese society has been undergoing a metamorphosis for some time. The traditional virtue of the Japanese women was obedience to the absolute authority of a patriarch. But by 1960, a series of democratic reforms had made patriarchy obsolete and freed women from the traditional Japanese family system. Nevertheless, even though they were legally free, Japanese women still did not possess social and economic freedom.
In the years following 1960, another change took place. The balance of power in the Japanese household shifted as industrialization and economic development reinforced a trend toward the centralization of business and commerce in large cities. Demographically, this trend was manifest as an increase in the number of nuclear families living in urban areas. The husband began to devote himself entirely to his company's business in order to earn a salary for his family, and the wife took over the major responsibility of managing the household. It became customary for the husband to turn his entire salary over to the household. This trend was reinforced by companies when they began to deposit paychecks directly into the household's checking account. The wife, as household manager, thus came to control the family finances. In this context, it seems as if direct deposit and the modern banking system underwrote the financial power of the wife.
This was how the typical Japanese salaried worker's family was organized when Minimata disease appeared. While the husband spent his time away from his family and community working like a horse for his company, the housewife's workday was shortened by electrical appliances and other household labor-saving devices. She now had time to gather information on social issues relating to the welfare of her family.
The Seikatsu Club Consumers' Cooperative began in 1968 during a time of rapid industrialization. Its members wanted to develop an alternative to mass production and consumption. This initiative took three different forms. First, they organized a consumers' cooperative in order to respect life, conserve valuable resources, and protect the environment. Second, they formed a workers' collective in order to organize women's informal labor in their homes. And finally, they developed a women's political movement to provide a platform for voicing their concerns, particularly at the local level.
The consumers cooperative started small with a bulk purchase of 200 bottles of milk. It now provides around 400 products, 30%-50% of the 800-1200 different products bought by a typical Japanese family, including food and clothing. Collective purchasing counters a tendency toward wastefulness on three different fronts:
For example, the Seikatsu Club buys sweet summer oranges directly from a group of families who suffer from Minimata disease. Assured of the Seikatsu Club market, the Minimata victims were able to reduce their use of agricultural chemicals, or even become completely organic, so they won't be a source of pollution themselves.
Two new co-op soap factories are scheduled to be built in the near future. The soap is manufactured from recycled cooking oil collected from Seikatsu Club member households and other households in surrounding area. In the neighborhood of these factories, household waste water will thus be oil-free as well as detergent-free. We are sure we can initiate similar campaigns to recycle paper, develop safer energy, and replace chlorofluorocarbons as the propellants in aerosol cans.
The basic unit of the consumer coop are the 7-8 housewives who make up a "Han," a concept carried over from traditional Japanese society. The "Han" was the communal organization for mutual aid in the Japanese rural village, where it was customary to work together as a community on many occasions, during the harvest season for example. The purpose of the Seikatsu Club "Han" is not just to promote collective buying, but also to promote good relations among neighbors who support and help each other. When personnel or community difficulties occur - as may be expected in a self-managed and democratic organization - we try to solve them by consensus in an openminded and fair way. We have a saying, "Where there are no difficulties, there is no progress." Our contemporary version of the traditional "Han" may be the basic unit of the cooperative community of the future.
The Seikatsu Club "Han" orders pays for products once a month, and these are delivered to one of the members' houses. The Seikatsu Club doesn't have shops because the transaction at the counter tends to devalue the meaning of being a cooperative member. Moreover, low advertising and distribution costs enable us to keep prices reasonable, and provide funds for the growth and maintenance of our cooperative movement. The cooperative is financed by the members. Each member buys 1000 yen worth of shares each month until her investment totals 80,000 yen.
As can be seen from the soap factory example in the last section, the Seikatsu Club producer's cooperatives are a natural outgrowth of our consumer cooperatives. We've gained a lot of experience working together as a collective. Our producer's cooperatives are an application of several decades of collective purchasing experience to areas outside the home.
We were introduced to the idea of worker owned and managed cooperatives by an Industrial Cooperative Association presentation, "Cooperatives in the Year 2000," presented by the late Dr. A. F. Laidlaw in 1980. We heard about the Mondragon group in the Basque area of Spain, and by various populist movements in Great Britain, the United States, and other places. We decided to adapt the concept of worker owned and managed cooperatives to our self-reliance movement of Japanese housewives.
Japanese women have equal opportunities for employment, but only while they are in their twenties. It is very difficult for Japanese housewives obtain interesting work. Worker owned and managed cooperatives provide interesting work at a higher income. They make it possible to have flexible schedules so we can both work and attend to household and family responsibilities. This is even easier if the workplace is close to home.
We have several kinds of producer cooperatives. One kind allows us to organize cooperative concept enables us to offer services that cannot be produced by government or big business. Some of our co-ops serve lunches to workers or elderly people in a community. Others help expectant mothers both before and after childbirth, or care for sick people. There are cooperative day-care services for working mothers. Cooperatives like these which provide services are based on the exchange of labor services where "labor tickets" provide the means of exchange. The result is a sort of cooperative women's economy.
We also have 80 regular producer cooperatives operating within the market economy and employing 2000 women. There are restaurants and bakeries, places to buy lunch boxes filled with sushi, a bazaar with shops selling fresh fish and vegetables, a cooking school, and so forth. Other co-ops are organized to recycle, or buy and sell used appliances, furniture, clothing, sporting goods, and so on. The soap factory is a bit different, in that it employs both members and non-members.
The workers who are members own shares in the producer co-ops. The value of these shares depends on the scale of the enterprise, and varies from 40,000 yen (240 pounds) to 300,000 yen (about 1,345 pounds). In order to foster the establishment of new ventures, the Seikatsu Club sometimes leases out spare rooms or land of its own, since the property of the Seikatsu Club is considered the common property of the entire cooperative community.
Needless to say, it is impossible for Seikatsu Club members to clean up the environment all by themselves, just by using natural soap. So they wrote up a petition to ban synthetic detergents and presented it to the local government. The first attempt was unsuccessful, so we decided to get our members elected to local assemblies. In 1979, the first Seikatsu Club Member was elected as a representative in Tokyo's Nerima Ward.
In order to increase our political clout, we organized a network of local action groups - the Seikatsusha Network. Our platform is very similar to that of the German Green Party. It includes protecting the environment, establishing local community welfare systems, and the working for a peaceful, conflict-free world. We campaign for nuclear-free cities. We campaign against the use of food additives, seaports for missile-loaded battleships, and nuclear power plants. A campaign of the Zushi City Network is particularly noteworthy: they have been struggling to stop the cutting of the Ikego forest to make room for military housing in Ikego Hills. The Japanese government has offered this site to the U.S. military to house missiles as well as troops. In this case, protecting the environment is closely connected with promoting world peace.
We believe that if there are enough of these local movements, we can exert an influence on the Japanese government. We will continue to carry on our activities under the slogan, "Think globally, act locally." We now have 36 seats in 29 city and town councils. Our representatives support civic activities through our women's worker cooperatives in cooperation with the local authorities. They are not affiliated with any political party.
The Seikatsu Club still exerts only a small influence on the direction of Japanese economic growth. But we are not afraid to say what we think is true. We have found collective purchasing through the "Han," community service by women's worker cooperatives, and making our voices heard in the political arena, to be very effective. Our slogan is, "Let's change our lives." We hope that the values of our cooperative community will diffuse throughout our country in the near future, and we are sure this will be an inspiration to improve the lives not only of Japanese, but of everyone on Earth.
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