Japanese

"Grandma's leaf business"

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, entire population of Japan is supposed to be decreasing from 2007 after a peak of 127.74 million of the 2006 because of the falling birthrates. The declining birthrate and a growing proportion of elderly people is supposed to cause serious problems, especially on present pension, tax system, and medical care, etc.

Basically, present social security system of Japan was established on the premise of the demographic structure of the pyramid and continuous growth of population. Therefore, if the current population decrease continues, the burden to the active service generation will increase unlimitedly and present system will be fall into bankruptcy.

Of course the government is examining measures to overcome these problems belatedly, but the remark that decides an argument has not being found yet.
In the meantime, an interesting approach of a local quasi-public enterprise was introduced by NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) the other day.

Kamikatsu-cho that is located two hours south of Tokushima city and has only 2,000 people is a typical village of depopulation and 60 % of them are more than 65 years old. However, "Grandmas" of average age 80 year who lives in the village are said to have been generating total income of 250 million yen a year.
The "leaf business" is to ship leafs affixed to tea-ceremony dishes etc. to the market in accordance with the request of the restaurant.
It should be noted that the grandmas in the eighties have managed to correspond to the market by taking full advantage of the cellular phones and the personal computers. It is said that some of them make annual income 10 million.

@As for the mechanism, JA Tokushima (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) throws the order to 100 of grandmas at the same time by the fax through the disaster prevention wireless. As soon as grandmas receive the order, they report "Leaf that I want to ship" to JA Tokushima over the telephone and cellular phone.

After that, they bring the commodities that made a successful bid to JA Tokushima within 2 hours by 1:00PM. The commodities are brought to various markets for putting them up to next day's auction, and the results of the bids will be transmitted to each grandma's personal computer at once. The data provided to their personal computers contains the sales on the day, total sales until the day, and the sales ranking as well. The grandmas make various marketing strategies as well as a corporation by analyzing those data.

When we talk about the aging society, we always look at it through the uniform viewpoints, namely, how we can secure the resource of the public assistances or welfare etc. However, what senior citizens really want should be to find sense of purpose in life by making their living instead of intrusive bona fides.
I was very impressed with the sharp perceptive and unique idea that only people who rooted in the local society can come up with.

2006/02/06