ABSTRACT
Public discussion of the volunteering in Japan has generally focused on
international volunteering, disaster relief and national nonprofit groups. Very
little attention has been paid to the activities of women in PTA, although all
schools in Japan have some form of a PTA and tens of millions of women spend
several years participating in these associations, usually when their children are
in elementary and junior high school. In Japan, women in the PTA are generally
not considered to be volunteers, but are thought to be fulfilling their duties as
mothers. The elementary school principal told me that women in the PTA are not
volunteers because all guardians are “automatically” considered members. At
first, I too did not think of women’s activities in the PTA as a form of volunteer
work but after talking to women who described PTA work as voluntary and as
I realized that all voluntarism involves a combination of self-interest, sacrifice
and idealism, I changed my mind. Women chose different degrees of
involvement, but many women sacrificed paid work and full-time jobs to work
for the PTA. The exclusion of PTA work from discussions of voluntarism in
Japan reflects the ways in which women’s work becomes marginalized and
devalued in the popular media, academia and in everyday practice.
