Japan rides hard times with tokens of 'love'

A decade of economic lethargy means more Japanese are working for "peanuts" – and "thank yous" and "love."

Each is a new local monetary unit. As the names suggest, they are the softest of currencies.

In Yamato, near Tokyo, one rabu (love) will buy an hour of babysitting or a massage or a discount on groceries.

The rabu is the most recent and ambitious of 130 community currencies that are springing up in regions across Japan to boost local economies and encourage closer ties between residents.

There are similar programs in about 50 North American towns and cities. But Japan – for reasons of culture and circumstance – is emerging as a global leader in the concept.

The new tokens of exchange are unlikely to challenge the yen any time soon, but they are fostering a new way of thinking about money and barter in Japan that stands in sharp contrast to the rise of megacurrencies like the euro or impersonal electronic transactions carried out over the Internet.

In recent years, local governments have launched their own currencies in the hope of reversing the decline of once-close knit communities. Most have names reflecting their aims. While 90,000 shop- keepers and residents are able to give and receive "love" in Yamato, the residents of Okamura island exchange dan dans (thank yous) in the local dialect.

While Yamato's love is tendered in tokens or – rather unromantically – through an integrated circuit card, a trading system near Lake Biwa in central Japan deals in clay. Elsewhere the monetary alternatives include bamboo, swatches of silk, and wooden disks.

Many of the communities are attracted to the new currencies are those where real cash is in short supply and time is more plentiful, either because of large elderly populations or high numbers of unemployed. Last year, Kamagasaki in Osaka, which has the highest proportion of homeless in Japan, introduced the kama for the increasing number of day laborers who have been unable to find work.

In Chiba, people now work for "peanuts," the name of a cash alternative that is based on a famous local product. Like most of the systems, it is small in scale but growing fast. As of last month, 540 residents and 50 shops had signed up to the peanut.

"The peanut has really taken off," says Mitsuya Katsushi of the local Community-Building Support Center. "The number of users has doubled in the past year."

Local shopkeepers report a 5 percent increase in sales since the launch of the system 3 years ago, and even attribute the spruced-up appearance of the central promenade to its introduction because the elderly women who tidy up the flower beds are paid partly in the new currency. But the biggest gain, they say has been in conviviality because the "rules" of the peanut system require users to shake hands and cry "Amigo" whenever they exchange the currency.

Local currencies are nothing new in Japan. The concept reportedly dates back to 1973 when a group of Osaka women established a "volunteer labor bank" to emphasize and use the value of unpaid housework.

But the idea has really taken off in the past few years in part, say analysts, because of growing economic uncertainties, but mostly because local authorities are looking for new ways to unite communities in which individuals are increasingly isolated.

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