Tsutomu Hotta, the founder of the Sawayaka Welfare Foundation, which was set up to encourage voluntarism, reckons that by the early 1980s many company employees were feeling frustrated with their lives.
Mr Hotta, a public prosecutor who led the investigation into the Lockheed bribery scandal in the 1970s before founding his welfare body, believes that one of the biggest problems is the paucity of organisations in Japan to channel the good intentions of would-be volunteers.