Tokyo Group Tries to Weave Disabled Residents Into City’s Social Fabric

Cookies, cakes, and curries — foreign foods that the Japanese have enthusiastically assimilated into their everyday cuisine

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— are now also helping to integrate developmentally disabled citizens into the country’s social mainstream.

Overseeing the process is Naoko Taniguchi, whose passion to see Japan become a more pluralistic society prompted her to help start a recreation program for disabled people in the early 1980s.

At that time, Japanese people with developmental disabilities lived either in institutions or with their families in very sheltered circumstances. Ms. Taniguchi, believing that they should enjoy the same recreational activities others do, organized a drop-in center in her central Tokyo neighborhood where people could get together for games, outings, and other activities.

Envisioning a center that would attract old and young, Japanese and foreigners, disabled and able-bodied alike, the organizers named the program the Palette Volunteer Support Group, after the board on which artists mix paints of various colors.

“People with handicaps have a right to live and work normally in the community,” Ms. Taniguchi declares. “The mission of Palette is to integrate handicapped and non-handicapped people in doing the same things. We’re all equal as human beings.”

Overcoming widespread skepticism among neighbors, local government officials, and even the families of people with disabilities, Palette has since expanded its vision in several directions to touch more people with mental illnesses or disabilities such as autism or Down syndrome. The organization now includes a bakery and a restaurant that employ disabled people and a group home that houses several disabled residents. And just last month, Ms. Taniguchi inaugurated her latest project — a similar bakery in Sri Lanka, established by Palette International Japan.

The Tokyo bakery, called Okashiya Palette, represents an effort to give disabled people more economic independence. It specializes in cookies and pound cakes — both good products for people with developmental disabilities to make, Ms. Taniguchi says, because their appearance, fragrance, flavor, and texture can all be appreciated in a very tangible way. Disabled people make and sell the confections in the storefront bakery.

“Most people said it was impossible,” Ms. Taniguchi recalls of the bakery’s early days. She started small: The initial production was about a pound of cookies a day. The operation gradually expanded, and today 10 disabled people in their 20s and 30s work with three staff members and several volunteers to produce nearly 130 pounds of baked goods a day.

While most workshops that employ disabled people pay them about $50 to $100 a month for the work they do, she says, Okashiya Palette has gradually increased its wages and now pays its disabled workers about $900 a month — plus a substantial bonus at year’s end.

In 1990, a couple of years after starting the bakery, Ms. Taniguchi created a restaurant — a small curry house that also employed disabled workers. After she started traveling to Sri Lanka to study the local cuisine, she learned that many Sri Lankans living in Japan cannot obtain working visas and are therefore illegal immigrants — part of an estimated 90 per cent of Asian foreigners who are living in Japan illegally, she says. So she hired Sri Lankan cooks for her Tokyo restaurant, whose steady jobs afforded them the credentials necessary to permit them to remain.

The restaurant, which offers Sri Lankan cuisine for lunch and dinner, now employs four disabled Japanese people and two Sri Lankan cooks, plus a Japanese manager.

The group home, created about five years ago, houses half a dozen residents in an apartment, plus two more people for short-term stays and five staff people who work there in shifts. Its mission is to give people with cognitive disabilities a measure of independence by allowing them to live apart from their families and take more responsibility for their lives.

Ms. Taniguchi has little patience with the paternalistic attitudes that still pervade many agencies that work with people with disabilities. Because neither of her children — both of whom are now adults — is disabled, parents with disabled children sometimes have questioned her motives or the strength of her commitment.

But the work itself has been its own reward, she says. And Ms. Taniguchi has become something of an authority on programs for people with disabilities. She is often asked to speak about her experience, which in the last few years has included several months spent in New Hampshire and a month in California learning about social-service charities in America.

Palette has grown from approximately 50 dues-paying members 16 years ago to more than 450 today, including parents of people in the program, professionals in the field, and other well-wishers. In its first decade, the organization relied on money from the local government to support its programs. But as those programs continued to grow, Ms. Taniguchi says, in the past five years the group has had to think of other ways of getting money.

The group’s total annual budget is about $150,000, of which some $60,000 comes from the government of the local ward in the form of subsidies for the group home and the bakery. Other revenue comes from the sale of baked goods and other items, and from an annual charity bazaar that relies on help from about 100 volunteers to raise some $10,000 a day over a weekend.

The organization also attracts donations from individuals, companies, and foundations — even though such donors cannot claim tax deductions.

“Local government subsidies are not enough for our organization, so we’re now more aggressive about raising money from foundations,” says Ms. Taniguchi. But most Japanese foundations make grants only for project support and do not underwrite salaries, office rent, or other overhead expenses, she complains. They also generally avoid making multiple-year grants, preferring to limit support to one year at a time.

“It’s inconvenient for us,” says Ms. Taniguchi, noting that her small staff has little time to devote to filling out grant applications for small discrete projects. “We need more grants to grow and improve.”

She deliberately incorporated the Sri Lankan restaurant as a business, she says, to show that employing the disabled is not incompatible with turning a profit. The restaurant gets no subsidies from the government.

“I think companies had better start employing people with disabilities,” Ms. Taniguchi says. “Most big companies don’t do that, so I thought I would make it a company and show how we can manage.”

The newest bakery — the Sri Lankan Palette Confectionery Project — also embodies a social message, reflecting her belief that everyone has the capacity to teach as well as learn. Last month, for example, two of the disabled workers at the Tokyo bakery traveled to Sri Lanka to help train disabled workers at that project — which hopes eventually to offer management assistance to other Sri Lankan organizations.

“People with disabilities should have things to give to non-handicapped people,” she says.

Ms. Taniguchi has noticed a sea change in citizen activism in Japan since the massive earthquake that struck Kobe in early 1995. “Before the earthquake, small non-profit organizations operated independently,” she says, and paid little attention to one another’s activities. “Now they are networking” — talking, writing, and meeting with one another to promote their common goal of increasing citizen participation in the formulation of national policies. She adds: “Each of us alone is small and not so powerful, but together we can make ourselves heard.”