The volunteers step forward

CHARITY, both as a word and as an ideal, was first brought to 16th-century Japan by Christian missionaries. The followers of Francis Xavier were subsequently persecuted by the great warlord, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who saw the self-sacrificing Christians as a threat to his iron rule. But the idea of charitii and borantiaru (voluntary behaviour) have become embedded not only in the Japanese language but in village life, too. True, for various reasons, there was little of it in the decades after the second world war. But the past couple of years have seen a remarkable resurgence in voluntarism in Japan.