Hope for the Holidays

As holiday celebrations kick off around the Club, Members reflect on how giving, not receiving, helps make the Christmas season special for all involved.

From her Suginami apartment, Cheryl Maynor can see the children come and go from the group home. When she has the time, she stops in for a chat. In her limited Japanese, she asks the boys and girls about their days and they happily respond in their limited English.

Most days, these moments help the Salvation Army colonel feel like she is doing enough.

A few weeks before Christmas last year, Maynor watched a 7-year-old girl shuffle off to school in nothing more than a light jacket against the biting chill.

“She was shivering,” Maynor recalls. “She was freezing, freezing cold.”

Those days are harder to bear.

“Many of the children in our care have no family, no extended family at all,” says Maynor. “We know they’ll be with us until they’re 18.”

Last year, 237 children had nowhere else to call home save for Salvation Army facilities. Some are orphans. Others have been temporarily or permanently removed from abusive families. Children with special needs, abandoned by biological kin unwilling or unable to provide the intimate support they require, are also increasingly coming into the Salvation Army’s care.

Live-in social workers cook, clean, attend school functions and try to teach skills the children’s parents could or would not. These surrogates work hard to normalize situations and make children feel wanted and loved.

“We need these kids to know that there’s people who care about them,” Maynor says. “We need these kids to know that they’re not just put in these homes and forgotten.”

Japanese society, though, is not as openly charitable as that ideal. A 2019 study by Tsukuba University found that in 2016 Japanese citizens donated a grand total of ¥770 billion ($7 billion) or just 0.14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. By comparison, Americans donated roughly 40 times more.

The World Giving Index ranks Japan, with the world’s third-largest economy, as slightly more generous than Estonia but not quite as open-handed as Croatia.

Throughout the year, the Salvation Army does what it can, but as the holidays approach, this takes a particular toll on the children.

“We have enough money to provide basic needs,” Maynor says. “[Our kids] go to school and they know what the other children have. They know they don’t have the same things.”

For just the second time ever in Japan, the Club is partnering with the Salvation Army for the Be an Angel campaign. The homes’ staff gather Christmas wishes from children who have no one else to ask, and through December 10, Members select an “angel” hung from a tree in the Women’s Group Office.

Those who take tags are buying gifts, but they are giving much more.

“They said, ‘Two sisters. Matching duffel coats,’” remembers Member Alaine Lee, 58, of the tags she took from the tree last year.

She approached fellow Women’s Group member Olivia Smith (“We act like sisters, too”), who jumped at the chance. Lee found the coats, one tan, one navy, and knitted two scarves as added gifts.

“Every child deserves to be happy, especially during the holiday season,” says Smith, 56. “If this is going to give them a little happiness, why not do it?”

The shivering girl in the jacket came to the Salvation Army two years ago. She and her sister had been removed from an abusive home.

The pair, wanting nothing more for Christmas than matching winter coats, will likely grow up in the Salvation Army’s care.

Christmas came and went. Lee and Smith celebrated with their families. A few days into the New Year, Maynor saw the sisters again—bundled up in their tan and navy duffel coats.

In a thank you note to Lee and Smith, Maynor attached a picture of the coat-clad girls with arms raised in innocent delight.

“It was breaking my heart,” Maynor says. “For them to have something that was picked just for them, it’s an opportunity for them to feel normal.”

Donors cannot help but prioritize the causes dearest to them, and in a country where charity routinely clocks in below average, this can have ripple effects.

“When [Japanese companies] think of charity, first it’s the Red Cross and second would be UNICEF,” says Elizabeth Oliver. “They don’t think further down the line to animal charities.”

For nearly three decades, Oliver, 78, has run Animal Refuge Kansai (ARK), a Hyogo Prefecture-based shelter for stray and abandoned animals. Some have been discarded by owners too elderly or ill to care for them anymore. Others are found wandering the countryside.

According to Oliver, animals housed together by the dozen in squalid conditions are a common occurrence in Japan. When the owners are arrested, their pets come to ARK.

In 1991, ARK rehomed one cat and five dogs. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, many of the 61 cats and 197 dogs ARK rescued and resettled came from disaster-stricken families struggling to care even for themselves. Now with operations in Tokyo, ARK has rehomed a grand total of 1,390 cats and 3,274 dogs, such as Juniper, family pet of Women’s Group President Heidi Regent.

“Any [animal] that comes in young, friendly and healthy goes out in a very short time,” Oliver adds.

It’s remarkable progress in a country where the average consumer values vogue breeds over the ethics of puppy and kitten mills and unscrupulous corporate pet shops.

“You’ve got to check the way [pet shops] are doing stuff,” Member Vikram Shahani says. “Very questionable in many cases.”

Shahani, 43, a lifelong dog lover, first encountered ARK as a scholarship student in Tokyo. It was 1999, and during some downtime at a part-time job, he spotted an ARK ad in a copy of The Japan Times.

“I was a student with limited means back then, but I sent [ARK] a thousand or two thousand yen,” Shahani says.

Donations like that add up. Starting with a special Christmas storytime in the Club Library on December 1 and continuing throughout the month, Members can do their part by contributing food, treats and toys for the cats and dogs at ARK waiting to find their forever homes.

Shahani eventually moved home to India, graduated from university and returned to Japan to begin his career. He met his wife, Chiaki, a Kobe native, and during a 2012 visit back to her hometown, Shahani realized that ARK’s headquarters were only an hour’s drive away in Sasayama. He called Oliver, scheduled a visit and set off on the drive up into the mountains.

To this day, Shahani denies any plan of bringing home a dog.

“The first cage, the first dog that I saw was Cadbury,” he says. “He stretched up onto the cage and his face was at my level and in my mind—this is weird as hell—I was, like, ‘What are you doing here? Let’s go home.’”

Cadbury (Cad for short) had been found wandering the mountains of Hyogo. The chocolate lab, then 2 years old, was brought to a kill shelter, but a nameless administrator called ARK instead.

“You’ve got to think it through,” Shahani says. “But overall the best advice I can give someone [who wants to help ARK] is get a dog.”

ARK has weekly adoption fairs in both Tokyo and Osaka, Oliver explains, with calendar sales providing a much-needed boost. She is currently raising funds to finish construction of new wings of the Sasayama kennel, just as Maynor and the Salvation Army are exploring how they can find ¥97 million ($900,000) to build a new children’s home.

Unfortunately, not all families can care for a pet, just as no amount of money can buy the innocent wonder of a child at home for the holidays.

But there is no telling what joy even the smallest gesture during the season of giving can bring to those who need it most.

Words: Owen Ziegler
Images:Kohji Shiiki

Be an Angel
Through December 10 | Women’s Group Office | Details online

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