Japan's Volunteer Labour Bank

Teruko Mizushima is a founder of the Volunteer Labour Bank in Japan. If you are a time-bank enthusiast, you’ve probably heard her referred to as the creator of the world’s first-ever time bank. Have you ever wondered: how the “first-ever time bank” functioned? How big a thing was the time bank in Japan? Does Japan have a time bank as part of society now?

This short article delves deeper into the story of the  “world's first time bank.” Don’t worry! Her story will not disappoint you, and you will be even more fascinated with time banks by the time you finish reading. 

What is a Volunteer Labour Bank? 

In 1973, Teruko Mizushima started the Volunteer Labor Bank. Volunteer Labour Bank had a very simple system: 1 hour of labour = 1 point. Points can be exchanged for 1 hour of labour provided by other members. Because new members don’t have points to exchange, there was an option to pay with cash only in the beginning. Then, the person would get the cash back by earning enough points, from which point the exchange would solely be based on points. 

Mizushima’s Time Bank functioned in neighborhood-based branch units to ensure that each branch kept a small enough scale to maintain the convenience of members to travel to other members to provide or receive services, as well as to maintain the close-knit, trustworthy community. Each branch had staff who helped people with onboarding, troubleshooting, and matching their needs and resources. While most of these details show that Volunteer Labour Bank is similar to modern time banks, there are a few things that are unique to this time bank. 

First, members were required to provide at least 2 hours every month as a volunteer (with the exception of people above 65 years old). Here, she distinguishes volunteer labour from rouryoku labour. The former, volunteer, is one-sided, whereas rouryoku labour is reciprocal. While she critiqued the one-sided giving and receiving of volunteerism as establishing hierarchy — the rich helping the poor, the young helping the old — and empowering one over others (leading her to encourage reciprocal labour), she also found meaning in volunteerism and the act of giving as a way to cultivate minds for care.

What was the scale? 

After its birth in 1973, Volunteer Labour Bank grew rapidly. Within two years of its establishment, the membership reached 1000 members. In the next ten years, Mizushima’s bank expanded to 215 branches, and the time exchanged was 480,000 hours in total. 

What was the main purpose of the Volunteer Labour Bank?

Mizushima established her time bank for two major purposes: to empower women and the elderly, whom she found to be two of the most isolated groups in the society. So, the majority of time exchanged seemed to have been used for women’s household chores, including childcare and care work for the elderly. Below are the lists of common services mentioned in her book.

• Child support
  
• pre- and post-maternity household care

• childcare drop-off, pick-up,
• babysitting kindergarten-age kids
• household chores
  • cleaning
  • laundry
  • ironing
  • shopping
  • airing out futon, Japanese bedding
  • mending
  • Fixing the Japanese paper door
• Nursing
  • caring for elderly people who are hospitalized
  • helping with the navigation of medical systems,
  • getting prescriptions
  • writing, listening, and reading on behalf of others

Besides exchanging labour based on community members’ pre-existing skills, Volunteer Labour Bank actively shared new skills through bunka-bu-koushuu, a cultural workshop. The workshops teach skills that improve the health of community members, such as baby bathing, acupressure, and emergency first aid. Moreover, as Teruko noticed an issue with the emergence of the nuclear family and urbanization, it was leaving behind the elderly. The bank often had time exchange for conversing, or even becoming a pen pal — types of services solely meant to build care. 

Teruko Mizushima’s Theories 

Volunteer Labour Bank, led by Teruko Mizushima, achieved an incredible transformation. Women and the elderly, those who had restrained autonomy and voice in Japan, were able to gain agency and become independent within the network of support. She called the type of independence through mutual aid that women and the elderly were achieving through her bank kyoudou-teki-jiritsu (協働的自立), meaning cooperative independence. She believed that independence can co-exist with financial, physical, or mental support. 

As mentioned before, she differentiated the Volunteer Labour Bank from charity or volunteerism. She critiqued the conventional, one-sided giver and recipient dynamic that erodes one’s self-esteem and agency, and induces shame and pity. On the other hand, she proposed that the Volunteer Labour Bank empowers a sense of self and worth for everyone, because even beneficiaries and recipients can become providers of essential resources and labour for the community. Within such a horizontal system based on mutuality and reciprocity,  independence could exist with a wealth of supports. 

Beyond autonomy and independence, Mizhushima imagined that the Volunteer Labour Bank could be a foundation for a radical solution to nuclear families. Mizushima lived through post-World War 2 as a mother and witnessed nuclear families start to take over Japan. Mizushima pointed out a variety of issues rooted in this family system. For example, she raised concerns for students who moved to urban cities away from their families, struggling to find housing in gentrified cities, and their jeopardy as they do not have a strong support system far away from home. 

She also observed that the nuclear family gave rise to the single-family home dream. While on one hand, the youth from rural areas are struggling to find homes, she saw how parents, after their children left their homes as they gained financial independence, lived in houses with empty rooms. Then, Mizushima found that the Labour Volunteer Bank’s social networks and trust system, spanning across 200 neighborhoods across Japan, could be leveraged to connect the households who were willing to rent their empty rooms and the students living far from home in need of housing. Even though many hesitate moving in with strangers, this Labor Bank had a nationwide network built on time-exchange; she reasoned that the trust and relationships her bank established could be utilized for people to find their second family. She even conceptualized the type of family built on the extension of the mutual aid system, like Volunteer Labour Bank, can be as kyougou kazoku (協合家族), which means cooperative family. 

Does the Volunteer Labour Bank exist now?

By 1996, when Teruko Mizushima passed away, the Volunteer Labour Bank was still continuing to keep its membership of approximately 4000 people across over 300 branches. In 2001, a non-profit organization emerged – the Volunteer Labour Bank became the non-profit Volunteer Labour Network. However, after this, the time bank activities dwindled significantly due to the loss of a powerful leader, the aging of members, and organizational inertia. By 2007, there were only 1000 members left.

Despite this, the time bank has left a mark by inspiring another adjacent movements. Fureai kippu is one of the most significant legacies of Mizushima Teruko’s time bank. Created by the Sawayaka Welfare Foundation, Fureai Kippu, literally means interaction tickets and functions very similarly to a time bank, but with a special emphasis on the elderly community. Fureai Kippu, encouraged people to make connections with each other at a time when the nursing care system did not exist. 

I hope this article sparks more appreciation for the transformative potential of time-banking, deepens respect for Teruko Mizushima and her incredible achievements, and inspires curiosity and interest to investigate the conditions that made the Volunteer Labour Bank successful – an example that deserves much study.