Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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Good ideas are seldom restricted to one time and one place, so it is not surprising that
shortly after Edgar Cahn had developed time dollars in the US, Tsutomo Hotta, a highly
respected former Attorney General, developed a similar concept independently in Japan
after a conversation at the London School of Economics. Hotta’s scheme, the Japanese
Health Care Currency, or Hureai Kippu, is now probably the biggest time dollar scheme
in the world, and evolved when it became apparent that Japan’s growing proportion of
elderly people could not adequately be cared for with government revenue alone.
As far back as 1970, a Japanese woman called Teruko Mizushima established her
own ‘volunteer labour bank’ and before long had 3800 members in her network. The
women cleaned, took care of the sick, cooked and babysat for each other. Another
Japanese woman started church­based time banks in 1981, and by June 1990 at least 46
other organisations were operating in the country based on that principle. Thus the
Hureai Kippu scheme had fertile ground prepared for its arrival. 19
In Hotta’s scheme, participants work for an hour helping old people with their
shopping or housework. If the participants work outside the hours of 9am to 5pm, they
get one­and­a­half hours credited to them, and if they do body care they get two hours’
credit. They can then either keep their time dollars themselves to use later, or can donate
them to their elderly parents in another part of the country for immediate use. Bernard
Lietaer, who has undertaken a study of the complex provincial and national systems
operating in Japan, says:
What was most fascinating to me about this complementary currency service is that people prefer
the service paid in the health care currency to the same service paid in Yen because it is more
caring. While a professional paid in Yen gives only a standard service, the little old lady I am
helping represents my mother, so I am inclined to give a bit extra. That difference in quality is
something which economists cannot see, but is extraordinarily important. 20
The success of this scheme could easily be replicated in New Zealand and other
developed economies. National currency is simply not needed to pay for labour­based
expenditures such as caring for the elderly, and in these situations time dollars can be
created in abundance instead.
The Community HeroCard
The concept behind the now defunct Community HeroCard is appealing. The
experiment, which ran from 1997 until 2004, worked to some extent and attracted
considerable grant money, including funds from the US Chamber of Commerce and local
government. Conceived by Joel Hodroff in Minneapolis, the scheme operated in two pilot