The political work of food delivery: consumer co-operative systems and women’s labor in “relationless” Japan

ABSTRACT

In recent history, the sudden visibility of food delivery services has alerted global publics to the labor asymmetries and the transformative potential of food transport in societies upended by change. Responding to these developments, this essay offers an ethnographic account of the gendered political economy of food distribution at the Green Coop Consumers Cooperative. A forerunner of the Japanese food movement, Green Coop and its delivery routes have become a platform for women workers to witness and respond to the societal effects of the country’s neoliberal restructuring. While similar organizations in other cultural contexts have struggled to move beyond exclusionary practices, women and mothers at this Fukuoka-based co-op foster social connection, accountability, and watchfulness in ways that surpass the capabilities of kin and state. Where scholarship has taken interest in the connective tissues between the spheres of production and consumption, this essay highlights and politicizes the node of distribution. Often cast as purely technical, the work of delivery is a prism through which to understand how demographic reforms bear on the food system, and how it has in turn become a site for citizens’ response.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative food network
• consumer co-operative
• food delivery
• gender
• neoliberalism
• Japan

Introduction

One Thursday afternoon in March, a woman I call Okamoto-san decided to take me on delivery route number H40, her “favorite course ever.” Okamoto-san is one among the multitude of women delivery personnel at a local Workers Collective (rōdō kyōdo kumiai) who journey around neighborhoods taking grocery parcels to the doorsteps of members of the Green Coop Consumers Cooperative based in southwestern Japan (see Image 1). On her workdays, she reports to a distribution and dispatch center in Fukuoka City’s Higashi ward, where a nondescript gray building opening up to a loading dock receives food items from producers and ships them out in delivery trucks. In the distribution centers in Fukuoka alone, workers like Okamoto-san service somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000 homes a week, with each truck making about 25 stops a day. Connecting these households to the organization, the co-op’s extensive order-delivery system serves as the bloodstream of the organization’s alternative distribution model and an organ of its grassroots democracy.

Image 1. A delivery personnel from Green Coop’s workers collective. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIeVMasHFSM).

In this screenshot from a TV commercial for Green Coop’s 30th anniversary, a smiling, middle-aged woman dressed in a uniform of red gingham stands at the entryway to a co-op member’s house. She is holding a Styrofoam “shipper” box with food inside.

Green Coop is upheld as one of the most dynamic and multi-faceted “alternative livelihood cooperatives” in Japan and a formidable socio-political force in the Southwestern region (Muto 1993). Its overwhelmingly female membership, made up of a base of professional housewives, is as large as 400,000 individuals hailing from 14 regional chapters from Osaka down to Kagoshima. Like most progressive cooperatives in the country and across the world, its members use healthful food and its provision as a springboard for engagement in social, environmental and political issues. Taking cue from the direct purchasing movement or “teikei system” (Kondoh 2015; Rosenberger 2014), Green Coop functions both like a consumer co-operative and an expanded community-supported agriculture (CSA) network, embodying the idea of democratic organizational ownership, while linking producers to legions of consumers.

For a few weeks in 2017, I joined Green Coop’s delivery personnel on their routes around the Fukuoka suburbs, donning the uniform of a red gingham shirt and khaki slacks, helping load the trucks, packing boxes, and carrying orders to co-op members’ homes. I had been living in Japan doing ethnographic research on long-distance food chains from the Philippines for nine months and had registered to join the co-op as a union member, or kumiaiin, over the course of my stay. As a kumiaiin on the delivery route’s receiving end on the one hand, and as a volunteer working those routes on the other, I witnessed how Green Coop’s delivery system fulfilled multiple purposes beyond food provision as it tied the curation and circulation of food to the intimacies of the home and the community. Delivery had come to function as social infrastructure drawing the socially marginalized into tighter connective circles in a societal context where many feel those forms of connection to be waning. The observation first become apparent in conversation with one of Green Coop’s delivery veterans, a long-term friend of Okamoto-san’s. I had asked her what it was like working as delivery personnel and she responded with a clarifying note. “It’s not actually ‘delivery’ [that we do]. It’s not just about making sure that items get to where they need to go” (Haitatsu dewa nai. Tada todokeru no dewa nai). Instead, she said, she saw the everyday operations of food delivery (futsū no haisō) as a unique opportunity to build “dense personal relationships” (nōmitsu na kankei).

Inspired by her reflection, in this paper I argue that the work of food delivery, often cast as purely technical, logistical, and apolitical in nature, is both socially transformed and socially transformative. I consider this argument as it plays out contemporarily in a Japanese consumer co-operative system where delivering food has become a counterforce to intensifying social alienation borne of Japan neoliberal reforms. Gendered labor, in particular, serves as a prism through which to understand how shifting demographic reforms have shaped this node of the food system, and how it in turn has become a platform for citizens’ response. To several of the women I got to know, there was something about being a woman that gave the work its unique purpose. As I would come to more fully appreciate while conducting fieldwork, women’s commitments to “relationships first, then delivery second” were as much a result of broader political economic shifts shaping the nature of women’s work and their role in food provisioning in Japan, as they were of their own personal magnanimity.

This account of the gendered political economy of food distribution serves as an intervention in critical food scholarship. Distribution, transport, and delivery are nodes of the supply chain where politically transformative potential is either largely unrecognized or hampered by exclusionary dynamics. Underrepresented in literature on the production-consumption nexus, scholarship on food transport has focused on the colonial legacies, infrastructural transformation, and technology transfer involved in crafting long-distance chains (Cronon 1991; Friedberg 2006, 2009). The labors of delivery and transport personnel – seamen, port workers, distribution center employees, truck drivers, and the like – regularly feature in these analyses, but rarely for the political potential of their work. This is despite the fact that delivery personnel are uniquely situated at pivotal nodes that determine the very nature of the food system’s connectivity. Studies on alternative food networks are important counterexamples in the ways they hold up provisionary systems as inherently political sites. Civilians involved in this space aspire to use these nodes to reconfigure local solidarities between farmers and their customers, but often with racialized or classist exclusionary results (DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2000; Winter 2003). Turning to Green Coop not only provides an ethnographic case to argue for the socially transformed and politically transformative quality of delivery systems. It also offers a non-Western model where actors have used food operations to achieve broadly democratized goals. Where alternative food networks have been critiqued as “epiphenomenal and transitory utopian entertainment for higher income consumers and their fortunate farmer friends” (Goodman, Dupuis, and Michael 2011, 47), Green Coop offers a practical example to the contrary. Their successes have taken hold in local communities in remarkable ways, in part as a result of this work having been gendered.

This ethnographic account of Green Coop’s food delivery networks and the daily work of the women who traverse them begins with an account of Japan’s postwar corporate welfarism and the subsequent shift to neoliberal restructuring. In response to forces that have imposed on women an excess of familial relationships while rendering other citizens “relationless,” housewives in particular have used co-op food delivery work as one fulcrum to engender new kinds of relationality for themselves and others. To illustrate the transformative potential of this labor, I elaborate on the forms of sociality emergent at people’s home entryways through the practice of door-to-door food delivery. In particular, I describe what I refer to as the state of irreversible witnessing, genkan (“entryway”) sociality, and a grassroots ethics of watchfulness. I conclude with reflections on the broader relevance of this study in an era when food delivery has emerged at the center stage of global public discussion and concern.

Food provision and women’s work in postwar Japan

Like all days at the Green Coop distribution center, the Thursday afternoon session begins with a few rituals. I spot Okamoto-san milling around the space purposefully, catching up with other group leaders on matters from the morning shift, and checking off various lists in preparation for the upcoming routine. A number of employees, all dressed in the same red gingham shirts and khaki slacks, begin to appear for the day’s work. They are all members of the Workers Collective, a democratically managed and operated branch of co-op that serves as the arms and limbs of the organization in local communities (see also Kutsuzawa 1998; Leung, Zietsma, and Peredo 2014). After a brief set of calisthenics, the delivery workers huddle for announcements, mandatory license checks, and slogan recitation (“We are delivering the co-op members’ precious food. We will adhere to traffic rules”). At 1pm sharp, everyone sorts themselves into respective teams, grouped by neighborhood, and queues at the farther end of the loading dock where the delivery trucks are parked. All the vehicles are opened and labeled with a small piece of paper indicating the course number – “H40,” for example, meaning Thursday afternoon course 40.¹

Once all workers are assembled, the loading (tsumikomi) of the delivery trucks begins in earnest. First to be loaded are assorted fruits and vegetables – from seasonal citrus, Fuji apples and bananas, to locally grown eggplants, peppers, radishes, mushrooms, root crops, and leafy greens – all pre-packed in reusable Styrofoam boxes called “shippers” (shippā). Next in line are chilled and frozen foods, a cornucopia of food items that include everything from yogurts, mixed cheeses, breads, and picked side dishes to sausages, sliced ham, domestically grown beef for curried stews, miso-seasoned roast pork, and processed fish cakes. Dry goods like sacks of koshihikari rice, bottles of soy sauce and rice vinegar, cooking oils, and snack foods, as well as drink items like juices, sake, beer, and, finally, milk, are the last to go in. These are only a few samples from the staggering 50-page centerfold catalog that Green Coop members order from every week.

Huddles and loading procedures often became opportunities for me to have a good look across the distribution center floor and take stock of the kinds of people who brought food to kumiaiin’s doors. Who are the women of the Workers Collective? What had brought them here? How did Green Coops’ Distribution and Dispatch Center become the site for their civil engagement? At each huddle, I was astounded at the diversity of the women in my midst. “There are people of all walks of life here – people in their 20s, people in their 60s; people who are married and divorced and single; people who have kids and people who don’t,” described one group leader. Some had joined the cooperative on principle, in the name of providing safe (anzen, anshin) and healthy food to their families (Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2015, 2018, 2019; Kimura 2016). A great deal more had joined on a more “light-hearted note” (karui kimochi de), accepting a friend’s invitation and developing their concern about civil issues after the fact. Where one fell on that spectrum often overlapped with classed differentiation. Over the course of my volunteering, I sat in the passenger seat beside women representing a broad swathe of socio-economic experiences and personalities: women who were warm and motherly to those who were salt-of-the-earth, women who had gone to college to those who had decided to culminate their education at high school, women who had signed up for work as a way to keep themselves active in their older age and those who used the extra cash to make ends meet. Such socio-economic diversity, it seemed to me, stood in contrast to cooperatives and CSAs in the United States, where scholarship has pointed out a “paradox of exclusivity” (Zitcer 2015, 2017) – they fulfill desires for community building, but primarily by catering to narrow racial and socio-economic demographics, while struggling with retention, and, in many cases, fueling farmers’ self-exploitation (Galt et al. 2019; Galt 2013; Guthman 2008; Slocum 2007).

A longtime partner producer for Green Coop once described the Workers Collective as an “internal capturing mechanism.” He meant this in a financial sense: by hiring co-op members to operate their own distribution systems, financial gains are internalized or returned into the organization, rather than externalized through the hiring of a third-party service provider. Congruent with the principles of cooperative-owned businesses elsewhere in the world, the belief is that this also instills a sense of ownership, personal stake, and pride in the work not least because one’s salary comes from one’s own financial contributions, and because one is delivering the same food items that they themselves consume at home.

Reflecting on the diverse demographics of the Workers Collective, I came to understand the internal capturing mechanism as operating in another sense. In a Japanese labor market still relatively closed to women, Green Coop’s delivery system serves as an open space where women anywhere along the so-called “M-curve” can recapture themselves and create meaningful forms of employment they define on their own terms. The M-curve refers to the enduring shape of the distribution of women’s employment in Japan from the postwar period onwards. The graph peaks at the 20–24 age bracket, when women graduate from schooling and are employed full-time largely performing office work; dips at the 30–34 age bracket, when they quit work to get married and start families as “professional housewives”; and then peaks again at 40–44, when they reenter the informal sector as part-time workers. This quit-and-return arrangement is reflective of the state and the industry’s vision of a woman’s ideal lifecourse, which between the 1960s and early 1990s served as the domestic support system behind white-collar “salarymen’s” lifetime employment. While the M-curve has demanded of professionalized housewives certain sacrifices (Borovoy 2014, 64-67; see also Brinton 1993; Lebra 1984; White 1987; Garon 1994; Sheldon 1997; Borovoy 2005), it also became the main reason why they have taken up prominent roles in spaces for alternative life politics. Japan’s alternative livelihood cooperatives, including Green Coop, saw the flourishing of their organizations in the midst of these changes. Kumiaiin members, many of whom were subsidized to be full-time homemakers, thus came to occupy positions of simultaneous exclusion and opportunity (Kondo 1990; Ogasawara 1998). Their physical and emotional “distance” from business, politics, public citizenry, and policy, as Robin LeBlanc (1999) noted in the now classic ethnography Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife, allowed them the time and the resources to pursue various engagements at the grassroots level.

When the bubble of Japanese economic prosperity and corporate welfarism burst in the 1990s, however, it reset homemakers’ motivations for engaging in civic life. Where the decades prior had set in place a broad middle-class consumer base, the neoliberal restructuring that ensued introduced deep social differentiation and uncertainty. The bubble years’ intense and often oppressive forms of relationality gave way to what would become labeled with the phrase muen shakai, literally “no en society” or “relationless society.”² With corporate lifetime employment no longer a guarantee, the postwar middle-class model family upon which Japanese society had been structured became “neither easily attained nor necessary ideal” (Kawano, Roberts, and Orpett Long 2014, 2). For many housewives, this meant disillusionment with marriage as their source of “lifetime employment” and, for women more broadly, steep increases in precarious work (Osawa 2011) and divorce (Alexy 2011). For the women I had gotten to know at Green Coop, such broad societal shifts imposed upon them overlapping roles: an enduring commitment to motherly duties at home and local grassroots networks, but also a renewed desire for self-realization through meaningful and independent work. One platform uniquely available to women as a space to fulfill both their duties and desires in Japan’s neoliberalized landscape has been the consumer co-op.

The consumer co-op, “another kind of society”

Japan has been singled out for having one of the most well-developed consumer cooperative systems in the world. Currently, there are about 150 such organizations around the archipelago, with a total membership of 20 million households or forty percent of the entire population, making co-ops the largest mass-membership organizations in the country. While these statistics suggest citizens’ weighty investment in independently realizing economic and ecological alternatives, it should be noted that a vast majority of Japanese co-ops are not easily distinguishable from conventional supermarkets, drawing their mass swathes of clientele primarily with the socialist-oriented principle of reduced pricing rather than with socio-political or environmental vision. Set apart from the majority, a handful of “alternative livelihood cooperatives”³ have been hailed as vanguards of the food movement in the country and in Asia more broadly (Yan et al. 2011; Merrifield 2018). Several ethnographic works have explored how these alternative livelihood co-operatives, especially the Tokyo-based Seikatsu Club, have become center stages for middle class housewives’ personal and political identity formation and civil-scientific engagement (LeBlanc 1999; Gelb and Estevez-Abe 1998; Kimura 2010, 2016; Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2019; Leung, Zietsma, and Peredo 2014; Avenell 2010). Through these groups, Japan’s food movement has operated at a societal breadth and organizational systematicity that in many ways defy the distinction between “alternative” and “conventional,” a duality that continues to define the work of similar organizations elsewhere in the world (Goodman, Dupuis, and Michael 2011).

Green Coop embodies many of the ideals that the alternative livelihood cooperatives share, but it is also unique among them. The Green Coop Consumers Union was established in 1988 through the merger of two cooperative federations, Kyoseisha and Chikuren, both based on Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu. It was one of several new and inter-linked platforms for civil engagement that emerged in the context of the country’s unprecedented economic growth, heavy industrialization, and rapid urbanization in the postwar period, processes that brought both new forms of prosperity and environmentally hazardous methods of production. The activists who founded Green Coop, men by the names of Kaneshige Masaji and Yukioka Yoshiharu, saw the need to bring politics into the everyday women-dominated realms of the household, rather than isolating it to the male-dominated space of the street demonstration. They envisioned an organization brought together by the slogan yume o katachi ni, literally “giving shape to dreams,” or, more interpretively, “turning a [mother’s] simple wish into concrete social action.” They introduced the “Four Pillars of Coexistence” (yotsu no kyōsei) – namely, nature and society, people to people, women and men, and the Global North and South – as the ideological charter informing the design and operation of the co-operative.

A unique feature of the Fukuoka-based co-op is its dual organizational structure, which places the Green Coop Consumers Union (kyōdōtai) above the Green Coop Association (rengō). The kyōdōtai is the majority-women congregation of kumiaiin members, including Okamoto-san and myself. The rengō, on the other hand, is composed of the male-dominated managerial departments for production, logistics, retail, financial management, administrative regulation, strategic planning, and information systems, among others. By maintaining an organizational hierarchy where the professional staff in the rengō are answerable to the kumiaiin membership, the organization prioritizes women’s societal aspirations, striking a balance between the co-ops vision and the realities of sustaining a viable business enterprise.

Another characteristic that sets the Fukuoka-based co-op apart from alternative food systems outside of Japan is that its kumiaiin members take on tripartite roles, acting not merely as consumers and primary investors, but also as on-the-ground managers and personnel of the organization’s various arms. This means that members are both the recipients of the co-op’s services and its main service providers. Everything from the operation of its stores to the development of its products, to the delivery system is made possible through the active, compensated, and regular labor of kumiaiin like Okamoto-san. This model is replicated across the sectors of the organization, where Green Coop’s predominantly female membership makes the big decisions in product sourcing, design, promotion, and supply chain management through regular committee meetings held at various community levels. Employees in the Workers Collective, for instance, run the co-operative’s retail outlets, distribution centers, and publication works, and manage its social welfare services, childcare nurseries, and elderly care homes.

Delivery work, as I will continue to show below, was particularly appealing as a space for women to achieve self-realization and independence. A recruitment flyer that I received in the earlier days of my volunteering advertised delivery services as a platform for “creating a whole new way to shoulder the responsibilities of working,” and as a way for women to craft for themselves a workplace that “fit their lifestyles” (jibun rashiku hataraku). “It’s like another kind of society, really,” said one woman delivery worker. “If you have a job you really, really want to do, you can make it for yourself.”

Back at the Distribution and Dispatch Center in Fukuoka, the loading of the food trucks ends almost quickly as it begins. In a quick but thorough flurry of activity, delivery workers strap the shippers in place, check and double-check its contents, and seal the trucks up. I help Okamoto-san perform the cross checks on the side- and rearview mirrors, the lights, and the breaks, before the truck is backed out of the parking lot and we drive off to the day’s destinations along Route H40. As I came to appreciate while on the route, women’s ability to reclaim such spaces for work and self-actualization had rippling effects in the surrounding. This was especially true in areas of the suburbs that were impacted by economic restructuring in ways largely hidden from view.

The state of “irreversible witnessing”

H40 runs through Aoba, a lovely suburban neighborhood in Fukuoka City comprised of relatively large houses, winding narrow streets, and sharp corners. Okamoto-san loved H40 for the simple reason that it had a particularly high number of people who were at home all day. Many of them were elderly ladies who had been members of the co-op for over 30 years. She enjoyed seeing the coop’s customers and having the opportunity to connect with them while going about her delivery tasks. “I can’t let go of this course, even if I’ve already become a ‘leader’ and technically don’t have to work the delivery routes anymore,” she told me from the driver’s seat of the truck we rode.

The particularities of Green Coop’s delivery model shaped the ways Okamoto-san and I had gotten to know the folks to whom we were making deliveries. Following a Toyotist model of just-in-time production, trucks were loaded not with sealed-up boxes, but rather with a disassembled assortment of the cumulative orders of all the customers along a route. Delivery workers sorted each consumer’s food orders into their respective shipper boxes upon arrival at that consumer’s home (see Image 2). This arrangement was intended to minimize time and space needs, promote constant coordination with its producer-manufacturers, and, most importantly, encourage intimate relationships with co-op members on the receiving end of deliveries. At every stop along the route, Okamoto-san and I pulled out an empty shipper box and worked our way down the customer’s order slip (denpyō); I called out the line items, and she unearthed them from the truck’s contents. “Hokkaido-made wheat bread, one! Pasteurized milk 900 ml, one! Genki Ippai locally grown eggs 6-pack, one! Small firm tofu 1-block, one! Single toilet paper 6-roll, one!” I recited aloud as the delivery veteran assembled and packed away each of the items. Once we were done, we sealed each shipper with strips of brown masking tape, hopped down the truck, and carried the parcels to the front door.

Image 2. Green Coop food delivery (Photo by author).

A Green Coop delivery truck, with its characteristic green and white stripes and yellow logo, is parked outside a co-op member’s house in suburban Fukuoka. The door to the truck is swung open. Inside, a delivery worker arranges disassembled food items to match the customer’s order.

Driving around the same neighborhoods once every week, delivery workers learned a great deal about the communities that lived there. Okamoto-san, for one, knew which kumiaiin needed help getting their orders right (“Mrs. Tanaka, did you really mean to order five packs of cranberry rolls?”), which homes had members in the family with demanding health needs, and on which streets she needed to turn down the music so as not to disturb napping children. She knew which elderly members had a tendency to leave stray pencil lines on their order sheets, scribbles that could be misread by the scanning machine back at the Distribution and Dispatch Center. She always had a couple erasers kept in her chest pocket for that reason and knew exactly at which points along the route she needed to pull them out. As she and I were in charge of assembling the delivery boxes at each stop, I was surprised at how quickly I, too, had come to learn certain families’ regular food orders, their quirky preferences and regular favorites, and changes in purchase volume from week to week. And because we delivered to the same homes so regularly, the kumiaiin members along the route quickly became friends, sometimes even closer than family. To cite the words of one other delivery personnel I accompanied, “You might not see or talk to your parents every week, or even every month, but you are sure to see a Green Coop delivery worker every week, guaranteed.”

As I watched Okamoto-san strike up conversation with members of the neighborhood, it occurred to me that a novel form of sociality had developed along the route, enabled by seemingly unremarkable moments in the food delivery process. These moments coalesced around the genkan, a wide concrete foyer abutted by a 10 to 25 cm step where delivery personnel entered kumiaiin’s homes and unloaded their ordered items for them. Okamoto-san, like many others, navigated her way to every genkan along route H40 with a striking sense of comfort and familiarity, making her way through winding footpaths, sliding open front doors left unlocked, and yelling into houses in search of the person-of-the-house as if calling on an old friend: “Good afternoon, it’s Green Coop! Okura-san, you home?”

A vestige of pre-modern Japan, the genkan is a liminal space around which social practices of guest reception and meal preparation have evolved over centuries. During the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), entry vestibules were intimately tied to the kitchen. They were the first space in a sequence of interactions where servants transacted with food sellers, prepared food, and guided guests as they progressed into the formal rooms of the home interior (Sand 2005, 50). With the modernization of the Japanese dwelling beginning in the Meiji Era (1868–1912), however, spatial practices turned inward to reflect social reforms that would culminate in the nuclearization of the family. The kitchen became a more intimate space, largely cut off from the outside world. It was reframed as the domain of a professional housewife-turned-advocate of modern hygiene, whose responsibility was to defend the invisible boundaries of the home from threats outside (Sand 2005, 68). In turn, the genkan, once so central to the home’s relationship with the outside world, was minimized in size and deemed little more than a “feudal remnant” (Sand 2005, 376). This is an apt architectural reflection of the increased social isolation that marks the 21^st century, a point I will return to below.

In his analysis of the modern dwelling, Jordan Sand contends that the genkan of contemporary Japanese houses fulfills primarily aesthetic rather than practical needs. Yet, the case of Green Coop delivery suggests otherwise, corroborating other scholars’ view that the space as continues to function both as a physical and symbolical threshold where entrants “leave society behind” (Fujiwara 2003, 32–33). Inge Daniels, in her analysis of the modern Japanese house, describes the genkan as a “social and physical demarcation between inside and outside worlds” (Daniels 2010, 61). Citing a study of the doorstep in Cuban homes, she describes its function as a fluid space that “neither accepts nor rejects family and friends” and that is “not quite private whilst not totally public” (Pertierra 2006). In the same way that the genkan is neither inside nor outside, Green Coop’s delivery workers use the space to establish relationships with community members that are interested but not prying, and welcomed but not entitled. Metaphorically (and at times literally) they stand with one foot in the door and the other out. Always, they are past a discernible threshold that closes Japanese homes off from the rest of the public world.

Looking into house after house from the view of the genkan, I felt, was not only to peer into the life of co-op kumiaiin members, but also to witness a slice of the realities of contemporary Japan at large. Sometimes what Okamoto-san and I saw beyond the foyer were rosy snapshots of family life: multiple pairs of shoes in many different sizes lined up in a shoe box (getabako) by the door; children’s drawings pinned up on the walls; and objects that suggested the homeowners’ personal hobbies, like fishing rods, butterfly-catching nets, or fresh-cut flowers. Other times, what we saw was heartbreaking: an aging lady taking care of her disabled adult son, bedridden on a hospital stretcher, in a ramshackle house of hoarded items; a frail 80-year-old woman, living by herself, who had to pull her weekly food deliveries into the kitchen in a basket tied with a string. Several other times, we met old men at home alone, desperate for conversation. These were co-op members who, still financially able to purchase weekly orders from the co-op, whose needs for social connection and relationality lay beyond the economic. “Relationlessness” is a familiar source of social suffering for many in contemporary Japan, and the term “relationless society” or muen shakai has become a common moniker for social experiences under neoliberal restructuring. In 2010, a TV series first introduced the term while reporting on the phenomenon of an estimated 32,000 elderly people who in the previous year died alone and unbeknownst to family and friends. In following this growing phenomenon, termed kodokushi (“lonely death”), anthropologist Anne Allison relays “stories of decaying or mummified remains discovered in a room or apartment where someone has lived isolated for years” (Allison 2015, 131). These happenstances have become increasingly commonplace, especially now that over 20% of the elderly live by themselves (ibid). In Allison’s analysis, this is emblematic of a crisis of social reproduction and a shifting “calculus of human worth.” Many of those who die lonely and solitary deaths are people who have fallen to the margins of normative sociality tied to corporate productivity, as well as to the postwar family nexus intended to foster such productivity. Blamed by society for failing to own up to their responsibilities (jiko sekinin), they become “social refugees” and “isolates” in their own communities (Allison 2017, 91).

In the moments I spent emptying out groceries from the shipper boxes at the steps of people’s entryways, the word miteshimatta sometimes came to my mind. The grammatical construct, which conjugates the verb miru (“to see”) with -shimau (“to be done completely”), can be translated as “to have seen, irreversibly,” or “to enter into a state of knowing that cannot be undone.” Such a state of irreversible witnessing seemed part and parcel of genkan sociality, which implicates the seer in the fate of the seen. I, for one, had become possessed by the sinking feeling that if something unfortunate – an accident, a sudden disappearance, or a solitary death, perhaps – were to happen to the elderly people along the delivery route, then it would have been, in part, my responsibility for not having done anything about it. I would not be able to sit with myself for having let something unfortunate happen after I had seen what I had seen.

Green Coop’s delivery workers, who every week witnessed, irreversibly, the struggles of Japan’s disappearing elderly, were taken to performing all kinds of extra “services” (sābisu) for the people they encountered along the route. At times I would be caught off-guard by Okamoto-san’s sudden disappearance, for instance, only to find out minutes later that she had been asked to enter a kumiaiin’s house and place the items in the fridge on their behalf (see Image 3). From her and from others at the distribution center, I heard stories of delivery workers helping out with household tasks, like swapping out lightbulbs or carrying boxes down from hard-to-reach places.

Image 3. “Relationships first, and delivery second” (Photo by author).

On a residential street in suburban Fukuoka, a Green Coop delivery worker walks alongside an elderly kumiaiin (co-op member) and carries her grocery bags up a steep hill.

Never, in my experience, were these acts framed as a form of charity or part of a dogmatic mission; instead, delivery workers considered it as part of the nature of the job. In fact, when I noted their big little acts of service, they seemed almost surprised, saying that it was something they did as a matter of course (atarimae). That affective labor had come to be expected, even normalized and internalized, points to the ways divisions of labor in the food system had been gendered. One other delivery worker once commented that it had never struck her as curious that a middle-aged mother like herself drove large trucks, lifted heavy boxes all over the city, and performed various tasks on behalf of the people to whom she delivered. “It’s always been about maintaining co-op member relationships first, and then delivery second. So ironically, women are actually a better fit for the job!” she explained. I found myself taken by her reflection. Here were a group of women performing exceptional work that they would not be doing otherwise, and yet they seemed not at all surprised that the work of maintaining relationality had fallen on their shoulders. That none of this was in any way remarkable underscores two points: that food systems are inseparable from the work of social production, and that neoliberalism had outsourced this to women, who fulfill key responsibilities in a country that continues to leave many people socially adrift.

Grassroots watchfulness

Where social strife can be hidden behind the physical structures of the urban landscape and shrouded by the presumption of a universal Japanese middle-class, food delivery work steps in to meet societal concerns in ways even the state is unable. In his ethnography of Kyoto City, for example, Jason Danely (2019) links the phenomenon of solitary death to the particularities of domestic and urban architecture. Danely tells of his experience witnessing what he suspects is the death of a solo-dwelling elderly person in Kyoto’s historic residential district. Woken up in the middle of a night by the sound of sirens and the arrival of an ambulance, he narrates his discomfort at his neighbors’ apparent indifference, even annoyance: “For my Japanese neighbors, the possibility that another solo-dwelling older person (dokkyo rōjin) had died just around the corner was not shocking, as it was for me, but rather produced a mood of grim dysphoria for a world that had become disarticulated from the home” (Danely 2019, 214). It was the event’s unwitnessing, its having occurred behind closed doors and shuttered windows, the author continues, that left an “unhomely” and glum atmosphere lingering in the community, “like campfire ghost tales.” The same homes that had been conduits for the postwar fantasies of rootedness and domesticity were now absorbing the excesses of neoliberal restructuring and, tragically, tucking them away from sight.

In response to the issues of social disconnect and unwitnessing, the Japanese state has launched several programs to re-tether citizens’ lives to government institutions. In his study of isolated death prevention programs, for instance, Shunsuke Nozawa (2015) describes municipal-level letter writing and greetings (aisatsu) campaigns, where senior citizens receive handwritten letters by kindergarteners and locals are encouraged to say “Good morning” or “How are you?” to neighbors. As Nozawa notes, these choreographed moments of contact are intended to monitor whether the addressee is in fact alive and physically capable of answering the door or, at the very least, to reaffirm his or her social existence through small phatic acts of conviviality (Nozawa 2015, 384, 388). Similarly, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare initiated its “Aiming for Zero ‘Isolated Deaths’” project, which seeks to mobilize community volunteers (minseiiin) to keep an eye on neighbors they knew were elderly and living on their own (Danely 2019). However, in documenting the project in Kyoto, Danely observed how such efforts have proven futile given volunteers’ inability to go into homes and check on people. They tended to devolve instead into opportunities for gossip, pity, disgust, resignation, and, eventually, indifference (Danely 2019, 221).

Where the state has proven to be ill-equipped to respond to the neoliberal crises of relationality, Green Coop’s food delivery system has proven to be a surprising space for cultivating a grassroots ethics of watchfulness and care. At one stop along Route H40, Okamoto-san and I parked outside a garage where a group, or han (班), of elderly women between 60 and 80 years old, were chatting, setting up tables, and preparing afternoon tea. Han is a collective purchasing unit of about four to seven neighborhood friends that come together on a weekly basis to place and receive orders from the co-op. Operating through han was standard in the early years of Japan’s consumer cooperative movement, but it has since become increasingly rare, replaced by individual home deliveries or in-store pick up arrangements. Every Thursday, I eventually discovered, the group of ladies await Okamoto-san’s arrival with great anticipation as the weekly co-op delivery became for them a reason to socialize and reconnect. “Did you see the ad for the rakugo (traditional storytelling) performance on the catalogue this week? It looks really interesting, don’t you think?” one woman said, inviting another to join her to the event. Okamoto-san, too, joined in the chit-chat, teasing one of the ladies for her order of amazake (a sweet, alcoholic drink of fermented rice), for which she received a playful slap on the wrist. Most of these women, as I would find out, lived by themselves, as their children had moved to big cities or abroad, or had started their own families elsewhere.

As Okamoto-san began to distribute everyone’s delivery orders, she noticed that one of the members of the group was curiously missing. She decided to pay the missing woman a short visit “just to ask if she’d like anything.” Without hesitation or much announcement, the delivery worker led herself up the staircase next door, and a couple of the other ladies and myself went up to follow her. The garden in front of the house had acquired a life of its own and there were dead leaves and rubble everywhere, tell-tale signs that the elderly woman lived on her own. Okamoto-san was already on her way down from the crowded entryway when I got up. “Looks like she’s caught a cold. She’s all puffy in the face. She only wants a few rolls of bread this week,” she reported back, filling out the woman’s order form on her behalf before we made our way back to the truck. Okamoto-san didn’t make much of the matter, but I interpreted the gesture as her attempt to let the elderly woman know that her absence had been felt.

Such cultures of watchfulness were also linked to city- or region-wide services in bottom-up fashion. Green Coop’s delivery system was registered with a prefecture-wide project called the Mimamori Net Fukuoka, an initiative to watch over elderly citizens who lived alone. Combining the characters 見 (mi) for “eyes” or “to see, or watch,” with 守り (mamori) or “to protect,” the project enlisted delivery service providers in the task of reporting signs of absence in homes they knew to belong to people over the age of 60: piled up newspaper deliveries, light switches left on in the nighttime, and laundry left out to dry for days on end. Having noticed the Mimamori Net sticker on the side of our delivery truck and on the walls of the Distribution Center, I asked Okamoto-san if she had ever experienced having to call in to report something. She told me that, thankfully, nothing had happened in her 20 or so years of working at the branch, but that there had been cases where other workers found shutters of once lived-in homes being boarded up or regular customers mysteriously going missing. “When instances like that happen, the first thing we do is to make a visit to the house, if we know where it is. If they [the neighbors] do not happen to know [what happened], then we might get in touch with the community representative (chōnai kaichō). Often we find out that this person was hospitalized or something this way.”

I had lost track how many houses we had visited on Route H40 when Okamoto-san announced that it was time to head back to the Distribution Center. It was about 5:30 in the afternoon, and the dashboard was piled high with a new set of food order forms and the back of the truck was emptied out. When we arrived at the Center, Okamoto-san explained that we had work yet to be done. Forms needed scanning, delivery reports needed submitting, the boxes needed returning, and the truck needed cleaning. I nodded, but in the moment found myself distracted by something she had said on the drive back. We had been talking about the Mimamori Net project and the importance of watching out for the elderly in today’s Japan when she interrupted herself to say, “But it works the other way around too!” Several times, she explained, office workers at the Distribution Center received phone calls from kumiaiin members expressing concern about their delivery being late to arrive. It was never the food items they were concerned about. “Perhaps they had gotten into a car accident?” the callers asked. Okamoto-san herself had experienced several times when folks on her route noted a swing in her mood on a difficult day or change in her upbeat demeanor when she felt under the weather. It was part of the reason, she said, that she felt drawn to the work of delivering food in the first place.

Conclusion

With each journey along the delivery route, the women workers of Fukuoka’s Green Coop Consumers Co-operative demonstrate that to deliver food is to transform community. Transporting the co-op’s curated products from the distribution center to the home, these workers become irreversible witnesses to the impacts of Japan’s neoliberal reform. Standing at doorways with food-filled shippers in hand, they behold forms of social suffering that are often tucked away from neighbors who cannot see past the opaque boundaries of the modern home, and from the nation-state incapable of mobilizing local representatives in meaningful ways. Against the backdrop of the country’s “relationless society,” where government forces simply cannot recreate for its citizens the joys of genuine sociality, delivery personnel use alternative food provision systems as an “internal capturing mechanism” to catch not only those left behind as the human debris of social and economic restructuring, but themselves as well. Women’s entry into this line of work, as well as their reasons for staying in them, are profoundly shaped by the gendered exclusions of Japan’s postwar welfare state and the gendered expectations of its neoliberal reform. Yet in reclaiming these spaces, they create relationships of obligation, connection and friendship along their routes, necessary forms of sociality that go beyond those of immediate biological kin, corporation, or state.

Community-based solidarity building in the face of intensifying relationlessness is just one way in which the delivery system fulfills social aims that surpass the transport of food products. At Green Coop, it has also become an engine for information exchange and community engagement, a network for the distribution of fliers about local environmental activities, correspondences from local farmers, and fund-raising campaigns on behalf of growers overseas. At several points in my own sojourn in Fukuoka, I became involved in community activism through event announcements I received in my shipper box, including a citizen science project on the undetected encroachment of Genetically Modified Organisms into urban ecological systems (Paredes 2021). Food distribution networks have also proven an effective mechanism for recycling, as delivery trucks collect emptied glass jars, plastic trays, and old catalogs, and return them to facilities where they are sanitized and re-processed for re-use. Workers collect data on the co-operative’s reuse and recycling patterns and publish them in the organization’s monthly newsletter.⁴

Importantly, in times of calamity, delivery networks were repurposed for the emergency distribution of relief goods, allowing civilians to reach affected communities faster, and often with more foresight into the specific needs of neighborhoods, than government bodies. In Green Coop’s most recent history, a massive earthquake hit Kumamoto province in 2016, and an intense tropical storm caused deadly floods around Fukuoka and Oita in 2017. I joined a group of co-op kumiaiin representatives on a repurposed delivery route to the town of Asakura in south-central Fukuoka prefecture, where the homes and farms had been utterly devastated by the 2017 landslides. We loaded the usual trucks with food, drinks, and fresh beddings, distributing these and other services to the community regardless of their co-op membership. During a quiet moment on the way home, the co-op representative I accompanied, a single mother and long-time member, reflected, “The rest of the world might not mobilize for one person, but that’s what we do at Green Coop” (yononaka wa hitori no tame ni ugokanai kedo, gurīn kōpu wa hitori no tame ni ugoku). I wondered if the impulse she described was perhaps propelled by a force I myself had come to know well: the state of irreversible witnessing and the feeling of a shared fate sparked by a chance encounter on the delivery route.

What model does Green Coop’s delivery system propose for our current era? In the past couple of years, the work of food delivery has gained significant public attention as concerns over the coronavirus pandemic have compelled consumers around the world to avail of food delivery services in unprecedented volumes (Purdy 2020; Campana 2020; Bhattacharya 2020; Osako 2020). The sudden visibility – indeed, urgency – of food delivery services has made clear the transformative potential of food transport in societies upended by change. “In the space of a month, [food delivery companies] have transformed from a luxury of the rich to the connective tissue holding much of the economy together,” writes one journalist (Griswold 2020). Consumers from the United States to Greece, and from India to Japan, have turned to delivery in search of ways to support themselves and others, especially family members suddenly cut off from their regular supplies. But, as global publics have come to appreciate, these nodes of the supply chain are also riven with asymmetrical risks and characterized by undemocratic modes of access and other pitfalls of scalable logistics. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the casualization of the gig economy had already subjected food delivery workers – labeled independent contractors rather than employees eligible for benefits – to the whims of faceless algorithms. If this ethnographic account has made anything clear, it is the transformative potential of food delivery systems that are people-centered, democratically managed, and collectively owned. When delivery infrastructures are open to laborers’ design, rather than technologically engineered to maximize market transactions (Frost 2020), they can become meaningful sites for building food systems that reflect the values of the people they serve.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to sincerely thank the Green Coop Consumers Cooperative for its enduring enthusiasm and support for this research. Members of Green Coop Fukuoka’s Workers Collective welcomed me into their midst, and their dynamism inspired the analysis presented here. This paper benefited greatly from the incisive comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers, the editor, and colleagues at Yale University’s Department of Anthropology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was generous funded by the Japan Foundation, reference number 10102350; and the Council on East Asian Studies, MacMillan Center on International and Area Studies at Yale University;Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies [n/a];

Notes on contributors

Alyssa Paredes

Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in the human, environmental, and metabolic infrastructures of transnational food chains. Her long-term fieldwork commitments are in the Philippines and Japan, where she collaborates with civil society organizations invested in environmental issues and solidarity building in the Asia-Pacific region. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology with distinction from Yale University and was LSA Collegiate Fellow at the University of Michigan between 2020 and 2022.

Notes

1. A is Monday morning, B is Monday afternoon, C is Tuesday morning, D is Tuesday afternoon, and so on.

2. En (縁) is a versatile word that can mean anything from a relationship, bond, or link, as in family ties and affinities, to a mysterious force that binds people together, as in “fate” or “destiny.” To have no en is thus to be relationless, irrelevant, or, in the Buddhist sense of the term, unable to be saved.

3. Consumer co-ops falling under this category include the Seikatsu Club, PAL System, Radish Boya, and Daichi o Mamoru Kai, all of which are headquartered in the metropolitan Tokyo area.

4. For the month of March, when I was volunteering on the routes, Green Coop’s 407,097 members collectively returned 101.4% of its milk bottles, 96.5% of its plastic mold packs, 72% of its reusable bottles, 44.7% of its plastic trays, and 11.1% of its plastic bags for recycling.