Gender power under female leadership: a local women’s association in Japan

Community Partnerships: Integrating Early Education with Childcare

“…However, partnership development placed workload burdens on paid and unpaid workers and on community members. Tsunematsu (2004, p. 112) speaks of the ‘invisible worth’ of voluntary activity and maintains that it cannot easily be replaced by paid work, coming as it does, through activities that are closely aligned with the day‐to‐day life of the community. The voluntary and self‐employed workers in Shared Foundation were also, in the main, parents of young families or parents of older children with recollections of their past childcare needs.…”

The Power Behind the Scenes [enno shitano chikaramochi]: The Activism of Buddhist Women in Hawai‘i

“…Further, the way the members utilized their skills as mothers and wives cannot be only characterized in terms of "domesticity," as they most clearly exerted a significant public presence and role in the church and larger community. 52 Many fujinkai in Hawai'i have a long history of providing humanitarian assistance to the community that capitalized on women's skills in the domestic sphere outside of the purview or abilities of men. For example, numerous fujinkai promoted activities such as stuffing envelopes for social agencies, rolling bandages for the Red Cross, making routine hospital visitations, and holding bake sales to raise money for the temple.…”

Mothers and Moral Activists

“…While studies find differences in volunteer activity between men and women (Nakano 2000;Tsunematsu 2004;Taniguchi 2006), relatively little is known about the extent to which individual aspects of religiosity per se encourage Japanese women's participation in informal volunteering and whether such participation has a potentially democratizing mechanism.3 In other societies, religious involvement is a "particularly powerful predictor" (Putman 2000: 67) of volunteer behaviour because of the collective aspect of religiosity, the structural side of religious life, the ethical drive, and its distinct effect on social capital accumulation. The extent to which religious involvement influences volunteer behaviour has been investigated to a limited extent in Japan and results are so far in line with extant international literature.…”

“…The information on Shinnyoen is drawn from fieldwork I conducted in Tachikawa and Tōkyō between 2002to 2004 Such a model of the mother performed by Shinnyoen suji-oya seems to entail more personal and social benefits than the prescriptive volunteer model sponsored by the organization. All Shinnyoen members, including suji-oya, belong to a formal volunteer association sponsored by their religious organization, the Shinnyoen Social Contribution Department, where they practice go-hōshi in the form of volunteer work.…”