It Began in Yokohama
I came to Yokohama, the historical port for Tokyo, to give a talk about our new GreenSpace enterprise to support development of new green, Nonprofit Centers. The occasion is the “TBLI” (Triple Bottom Line) Conference that occurs regularly each year in Europe and Asia.
The trip turned into a wonderful opportunity to reprise my time in Japan nine years ago, lecturing to those active in the nascent movement to create a nonprofit sector in Japan. A new law was passed in 1998 creating the possibility for these corporate structures which hadn’t previously existed in Japan. Since, there have been three refinements in the law, and there is much work being done to expand the applicability for tax deductibility. Only some 300 NPO’s are deductible out of the 36,000 that have been formed, and there are other aspects to the question of establishing clear boundaries for appropriate NPO activity in the advocacy sphere. It’s a vibrant time in this small sector of Japanese social landscape, and it holds so much potential.
One of the most interesting conversations I had was with Professor Kanji Tanimoto and a small seminar group at Hitotsubashi University (in Tokyo) comprised mainly of executives with multi-nationals and banks (Microsoft, HSBC, etc.). We spent a good deal of time talking about Katherine Fulton’s premise that the for-profit and nonprofit sectors are converging toward each other. The old paradigm where business really ONLY cared about the bottom line is giving way to a new paradigm where success in business may in fact be more linked to practices that incorporate ESG (environmental, social, and governance) aspects into HOW businesses do business. In Japan, it would seem, the NPO sector can play a role in working with businesses to embrace this emerging awareness.
This discussion was a wonderful connector back to the TBLI Conference that had brought me to Japan in the first place. More on that in another blog post. Let it suffice to say that while our friends on the right continue to see Tides and progressives in a very limited light, there is an expanding and fascinating world out there in the business community that ties together strands of creative private enterprise and deep commitments to addressing social justice and global sustainability. The inanity – and occasional tragedy (witness the assassination of Dr. Tiller) – of the right / left divide simply must give way to a new synthesis.
Japan has unique characteristics as a society – a very different and non-western society – that may enable it to make significant contributions to this evolving possibility. A more homogeneous society, Japanese have the ability to forge a new consensus and move quickly to pursue implications of a changing awareness.