Part One: Bethel House: How Schizophrenic Folks in Japan Created a New Model of Psychiatric Care

Margaret talks with Samantha McVey about the decades-long project in Northern Japan full of worker-cooperatives and new ways of living.

https://www.dinf.ne.jp/doc/english/resource/bethel/bethel_0805.html
Karen Nakamura, A Disability of the Soul
https://aeon.co/essays/japans-radical-alternative-to-psychiatric-diagnosis

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that all over the world people
do really cool stuff and that most of the time,
the way that good things happen is that some small
group of people says, we have a small to medium
sized problem and we're going to solve it, and then
we're going to talk about how we solved it so
that other people can solve it in similar ways. That's
always the theme of the show. I'm your host, Margaret Kiltroy,

(00:27):
and my guest, one of my favorite returning guests is
Samantha McVay.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Him, I am okay. I think that's the sentiment that
we've decided on that we're not necessarily great, but we're
here and we're better than some so that's we're very privileged.
But thank you for inviting me. I needed to hear
cool things. So this is going to give me a
good pick me up. I think I'm excited.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
I think so too. This is gonna be a really
posy episode. I feel really good about it, which is
funny because it comes out on the day of the
inauguration of Donald Trump. No, but we're in the past,
so we have nothing to worry about it to you
people in the future listening who might have a more
immediate problem. Samantha is the host of one of the

(01:12):
hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You, which just did
an episode I was listening to while I was cooking
dinner right before this about women in the apocalypse. And
that's the kind of stuff. Maybe not all of it's
about women in the apocalypse, but that's the episode I
most recently listened to. How would you describe Stuff Mom
Never Told You.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
I think it's a mixed bag about intersectional feminism, and
we talk about fictional things, nerdy things, political things, good things,
sad things, all the things. If it has something to
do with feminism, intersectionality, we're talking about it.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Hell yeah, well this one has more to do with
intersectionality than feminism, but it does have something to do
with feminism. Okay, So, about a month or so ago,
we did a bunch of episodes on a place called
Fountain House in New York City and the clubhouse model
for people with severe mental illness to use the medical term,

(02:08):
And this is a place that people can go back
and listen the episodes. But you know, for anyone who
hasn't heard it. It's a place where people who starting
and I would say the forties. I don't remember the
data anymore because I didn't put it in my script,
because it's from a previous episode started a long time ago.
A bunch of people who had gotten out of an
institution for psychiatric care got together and started a clubhouse

(02:30):
to build their own sense of agency and take care
of each other. And that has built since then into
this like international model for how to do psychiatric care
in a better way. And while I was researching those episodes,
I asked my friend who works at Fountain House, if
there was anything else he'd like to say, and he

(02:53):
told me that I really needed to look into a
place called Bethel House in Japan, and he told me
about his time there. He went and like learned to
see how they went there to learn how they did things,
and he was so impressed by what they were doing,
which in some ways he considered fundamentally more radical than

(03:14):
what he was doing with the clubhouse model. So I
went and ordered the only English language book on this
particular subject. It's by Karen Nakamura. It's called a Disability
of the Soul, an ethnography of schizophrenia and mental illness
in contemporary Japan. And it came packaged with a DVD

(03:34):
and I'm far too millennial, at do you have a
way to play DVDs?

Speaker 1 (03:38):
You know, we were trying to figure this out. I
think my partner has like a Blu rape player. Okay,
unnecessarily because you know, sometimes they don't do well with DVDs. Ye,
They're okay to do it.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
So maybe I got it. And I was like, what
the hell am I going to do with this frisbee
that's in the back of my book, you know. And
then fortunately for me, the document is also online. It's
called Bethel b E T H E L also by
Karen Nakamura, and so I was able to watch that too.
And so that book, plus a bunch of more recent

(04:09):
articles about the larger impact of Bethel House and an
interview I did a couple months ago with my friend
are my main sources for this episode. And I'm curious.
I'm sort of assuming not because in my mind these
are sort of niche topics. But have you heard of
have you heard of this at all?

Speaker 1 (04:24):
No? No, I have never heard of this. I will
say my information for like Japanese culture is very limited,
so I don't know too much. So I'm really excited
to hear about this because I know like more for
like Asian abroad, Asia abroad, Asia abroad kind of there's
like attitude poor disabilities, I'll say it that way, more

(04:46):
so that I know about Japan in general. So this
is very very new and I'm excited to learn.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
I'll be interested to know because yeah, I was able
to compare it to a little bit of what I
know about like European and North American models, But I
kind of assume, and maybe it's just a rud assumption,
I just sort of assume the Japanese models like fairly
different than the rest of East Asia because like I
don't know, I tend to think of Japan having a
more distinct culture right than people assume, you know.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, they I would definitely agree with that. I think
they have a very unique like just the culture in general,
and just what I know in general is just very
is unique to itself. There's a lot of blending, we
know this, but they also love being a little bit
on the outskirts of like outside of your typical what

(05:37):
you would think of as East Asian.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, traits that makes sense. And you know, I now
know a fair amount about psychiatric care in Japan over
the course of the past two thousand years, because I've
just read about it and put it into this script.
But I like don't know how it compares to the
rest of Asia. I only know it compares to North
America and Europe, so I'll be curious. But the shortest

(06:02):
version of this story, the story of Bethel House, is
that in the nineteen eighties, a bunch of former patients
of a psychiatric hospital in a very remote rural town
in northern Japan got together to support one another after
they've been discharged, and they were mostly folks dealing with schizophrenia.
Working hand in hand with social workers and doctors, they've
built an entirely new model on how to handle their

(06:24):
own mental illnesses and frankly a model of living and
working that anyone might be envious of. They've built a
huge number of worker owned businesses to support themselves financially
while also providing necessary services to their surrounding community. They've
developed a series of self study protocols that have gone
on to provide agency for people with all sorts of

(06:46):
disabilities in Japanese society all over the country.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
Self study.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, that's going to be like kind of the last
thing we end up talking about on this episode.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
But like, Okay, obviously you've already gotten me interested, Like hmm, intrigue.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
No, the self study thing is so fascinating. And the
thing that's really interesting is it wasn't really an assimilationist model.
They didn't do this so that they could rejoin society
per se, but they also didn't do it to reject society.
They wanted to be able to do their own thing
in a way that works for them but also works

(07:23):
hand in hand with the rest of society, sort of
almost a like together we approach the rest of society
as a group, we can fit into society as individuals
were not doing so well, right, And I think they're
really cool. So I'm gonna talk about Bethel House.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
I love this. I love this conversation because it makes
a lot of sense. Like we know what happened with
the disability population, and we know how bad of a
rep all of that can get, yeah, and how it
truly can be in general, But when you see it
in the hands and ownership of those people who are
being treated, it's probably a whole different conversation, and I

(08:01):
love that idea and model.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Exactly and the fact that like both the fountain House
model or the clubhouse model and the Bethel House model
both really come down to building agency for people. And
what's cool about it is that something I've run across
a bunch, like I used to. Right. I have another
podcast called Live Like the World is Dying, and it's
about preparedness, an individual and community preparedness, and one of

(08:26):
the main questions we get from from listeners is like, well,
I'm disabled, how do I fit into preparedness?

Speaker 1 (08:33):
Right?

Speaker 2 (08:33):
And so we've done a lot of episodes around that,
and one of the things that's come up is when
we talk to disabled preppers is that it's not really
a like, oh, what can accommodations can be abled make
for disabled preppers? That's part of it, right, you know,
accommodations matter, right, But it's more like, oh, you all
are so much further along, how can we learn from you?

(08:55):
You know? And not in a like wow, you're so
inspiring way, but like a way likely.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
Was that, but truly like putting into practice, like in
inability of like, oh this makes sense. Why didn't we
think of this type of way.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, exactly. And so this fact that like all of
these folks dealing with all this stuff are learning how
agency is the key to not necessarily healing, but living
with the stuff that they live with. It's like that's
something that everyone should learn.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, And I think we've all kind of
come to the point that we have to admit all
of us have a diagnosis. What that is maybe different
for each person on the different levels of the spectrum
whatever that might be, and that in understanding also that
those diagnoses should be in spectrums. Like I think we
really came into that big play in understanding a little

(09:47):
bit more about autism and understanding it as a spectrum
instead of being like, oh is this or this or this, Like,
I think we've really come far, not far enough, but
come far in that kind of conversation. We can have
a whole conversation about the DSM, but but just saying
in general, like being able to actually see that it
makes it. It makes a difference, It makes a difference

(10:08):
in how we approach it. And again, like I said,
we all need therapy. So yeah, this is wonderful.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
No, totally, And like like when we talk about like neurotypical,
and people are like, what the hell is neurotypical? You know,
or like certainly in contrast to certain things like some
people have add and some people don't right right, you know,
and then there's like a spectrum and all that stuff.
But like that person without a d D, there's no normal, Like,

(10:33):
no one's brain is just like I'm the normal brain.
My name is John Smith. I don't know if you're
listening to your name, John Smith, I'm not accusing you
of a normal brain. Don't worry all all of y'all. Yeah,
all John Smith's. Everyone else crazy John Smith's. They're good
well normal, Yeah, and you know that's really something to

(10:55):
be proud of, and which is kind of Oh, we're
going to get to it. I love how this this
one's going to mix like mad Pride, but without a
complete rejection of I don't know whatever anyway, Okay, so
this story.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
I'm ready for it, all right.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
For the longest time, people with mental health issues in
Japan were more or less confined to the home, with
some certain exceptions of very rich people, but also some
of the very rich people were also confined to the home.
From the medieval period, at least to around nineteen fifty
or so. This was the case if people with mental
health issues were out and about, that was disruptive and

(11:30):
it would bring shame to the family, so people had
to stay at home. One of the while I was
like researching all this part of it, I have to say,
one of the traditional cures in Japanese society for mental
health issues actually is kind of interesting from the medieval era,
and the idea was you're being affected by spirits, which
is not particularly different from Western conceptions at the time.

(11:51):
I want to be really clear upfront when I'm like,
Japan as a country did all this bad stuff, like
so did everywhere. I have talked about Western countries being
horrible about this stuff too. I'm not trying to exceptionalize
Japan around this, but save this idea that you're being
affected by spirits, and one of the really good ways
to get rid of these spirits was to meditate and

(12:11):
rest so much that you were so boring that the
spirits would move on. And like, I bet that works
a lot of the time. Like you know, like because
a lot of problems are caused by anxiety, not all
of them, but like you know.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
It doesn't help for sure, it definitely eggs things on
a little extra.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah, and so you know, I bet quiet meditation, you know,
whether the metaphor is literal or not. Locking people up
in their house though, was probably way less effective, and
they weren't being locked up for their sake. They were
being locked up for the sake of society and for
the family. During the Meiji Restoration of the late nineteenth century,

(12:54):
which is when Japan tried to modernize, like just as
fast as they could doctors in Japan, we're like looking
to the West about like, oh, how should we do
psychiatric stuff? And they studied German methods of care, and
so for like a century, patience notes would be written
in German, kind of in the same way that in
the West you'd see people like writing in Latin, like

(13:15):
centuries beyond it makes any sense to write in Latin
just because it's like the specific culture of a specific
profession or whatever, you know. But one profession that I
totally value and did not mean to ignore was that
of both a podcast producer and a podcast editor. And
our podcast producer is Sophie Lichterman, who you've probably noticed
isn't on this call.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
I miss you.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
I know, but our audio engineer is still Rory, and
everyone has to say hi to Rory. Hi, Rory Hi,
Rory Hi. And our theme music was written for us
by oone woman. And Sophie is thinking to herself right now,
this is why I have to be on, because Margaret
forgot to do the credits until like good ten minutes
in or something like that.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
You know, I thought you were just doing a good
teaser at the beginning, you know, that's what we were
trying to do.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Oh yeah, like a cold open. Oh totally, I'm very professional.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you're just switching it up in twenty
twenty five.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Come on, yeah, yeah, exactly, keeping everyone on their toes.
You know, you have no idea when you're listening that
you're going to be commanded to say hi to Rory.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
And I will always say hi to Rory I know,
whom I've never actually officially met, but hello.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah TYRORI. So during the Meiji restoration, you start getting
psychiatric hospitals opening up, but they're basically just for the rich,
and honestly, it's not much better than being at home.
And this is the pre antipsychotics era, So this is
the era of lobotomies and electroshock and ice baths and

(14:39):
all the stuff, all the things that are in horror
movies because of how people were treated and it wasn't
good for them. In nineteen hundred, Japan passed a law
that said that people dealing with mental illnesses were legally
the responsibility of their families, not like the state. People
built prison cells in their own home. An author named

(15:02):
at Saratotsuka wrote about the attitude towards people at the time. Quote,
mental illness was regarded as genetic, incurable, impossible to understand,
and dangerous. As a result, the mentally ill were thought
to be a disgrace to the family. The Japanese did
not want to talk about them, did not want to
see them, to hear about them, to get married to them,

(15:22):
and they did not want to employ them. And I'm curious, Okay,
so you know, I promise i'd tell you kind of
Japan's attitude. We'll talk about nineteen fifty it switched, but
like that's where we're at so far. I'm curious if
you know how it compares to anything else.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Well, I will say just in general when I think
about mental health, and I leaned towards South Korea because
obviously that's my heritage and I don't know much about it.
But they do have like higher rates of death by
suicide outside of more countries. So in general, they kind of,
like most Asian ideals, try to ignore the ugly pars

(15:59):
and hope will go away. That's what I seem to
be noticing. I haven't really studied much about like attitudes
with diagnoses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or any
of that. It could be partially because that's not a
lot of diagnosis to that. Maybe I'm wrong. I think
the diagnosis maybe a lot more misdiagnosis, maybe up until

(16:21):
not too long ago. Again, maybe not, because having a
diagnosis is not always great according to society, see to
actually have it to be diagnosed. Work culture in itself
in South Korea specifically, is really harsh and really hard
to navigate. Sometimes even getting a job. I think it's

(16:41):
gotten really difficult and getting a job is so hard,
like the prejudice that lies in getting a job. You
might be too old and too old maybe forties for
a job, or you might not be well enough educated
or gone to the right colleges. They're very particular in that.
So to me, what I've seen is that they have

(17:01):
to address and all of Korean people are like, oh,
but there's a lot of needing to be addressed of
the basics before they even are willing to talk about
actual problems like that. So, and I could be wrong.
I have a feeling there's probably groups who have actually
done a lot of work that I haven't discovered yet,
So I apologize to them for not discovering them. But

(17:24):
it's not a very good look. Like I would not
want to be in South Korea if I had an
actual proper diagnosis, just because of the stigma that could
attach to itself and other people's judgments of them.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, no, that makes sense, And I think that is.
I can't speak as much for contemporary Japan because my research,
you know, kind of goes up to a certain point,
but like, I think that that's a similar thing, and
there's there's probably nowhere in the world where it's like,
well that's not true. There's all kinds of non modernized
societies in which actually there's a very different view of

(17:59):
what we call mental illness. Right, And then I even
like I didn't end up writing to the script. I
spent a while reading all of these sort of academic
arguments about whether or not it even is fair to
say that a Japanese patient has schizophrenia versus like a
different cultural conception of exactly what that means. And one
of the things that is interesting and does play into it,
and I might end up repeating myself because this might

(18:20):
be in the script but I don't remember, is that
the psychiatric illnesses in this context, in Japanese context, at
least as I was reading about it, include things like alcoholism,
They include substance abuse, and they also include intellectual disabilities.
You know, people have issues with certain types of learning
and other things like that, and they're all kind of

(18:42):
lumped together, and it creates an interesting mix and a
different way of mixing it than you know happens in
North America. And yeah, like what we call schizophrenia or
psychosis or all of these things are always changing, you know.
But what ended up happening so for a long long time,

(19:03):
people in Japanese society who are dealing with these issues
are blocked away in the home and sometimes physically locked away.
They're called bird cages. The cells that people would build
in their own homes because they were legally the responsibility
of the state, and that law in nineteen hundred was
just codifying a thing that already existed. People already knew

(19:23):
it was the family's responsibility. And that started to change
around nineteen fifty or so. You get mass institutionalization. Each
prefect is building its own hospitals, and patients are now
legally the state's responsibility instead of the families. And there's
like basically like the copay for mental health care becomes

(19:45):
about five percent and the state is picking up the rest.
But this isn't really making anything better. This is a
lateral move. As far as I can tell, people were
put into facilities for extended stays, many of them more
or less permanently. What's interesting about this timing is this

(20:05):
is right when deinstitutionalization hits the West, which was also
not perfect. But basically this is like the US, Europe,
and South America, at least those are the places I've
read about. It was like institutionalization is bad, and so
they managed to get everyone freed from the hospitals. But famously,
all those countries, all those areas are very capitalist, and

(20:27):
so the people were deinstitutionalized and not provided with resources,
and so it was actually bad in a mess.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
You're right. I mean that's kind of the tails all
the time that continues, people perpetuated, whether we're talking about
foster care systems, whether we're talking about treatment centers for
young young kids for rehabilitation. The amount of aftercare that's
given is so limited. I mean we could just say
that about women who have children, yeah, totally, or not

(20:54):
just women, but people who have babies. Their care maybe
six weeks. Yeah, and that's if you are under a
threshold oftentimes and you ask for help. Like, it's such
a sad when you talk about the need of after
care for any and almost everything and the lack of
I mean that the whole idea of pro life is

(21:14):
that as long as you have that thing, we don't
give a shit afterwards. So you do you? Yeah, I
mean that's kind of the entire attitude. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Absolutely, But you know who does care about you? Samantha mcfing.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
I have a feeling're gonna lie to me, but I'm
gonna listen.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
I am gonna lie to you because I'm going to
tell you that the products and services that support the
show care about you. But that's not true. But if
it makes you feel any better, listener, They don't care
about anything, and except sometimes we get ads for like
genuinely good stuff. So you know what, listener, it's a
toss up. I'm not saying what's coming is good or bad.

(21:47):
It's up to you to determine how you feel about it.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
I'd be good for you.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
All we can say about these ads is that they
had enough money to give us money to play their advertisements,
and here they are. So we're back. And Japan is
starting to put people into hospitals and I think it

(22:11):
is still, but I'm not certain because most of my
sources about this are at least ten years old or
about ten years old. Japan is or was one of
the leaders of the world of the length of stays
and the amount of medication it puts mental patients on.
And to be clear, I'm not about to start talking
in anti medication. This is Bethelhouse is not an anti

(22:31):
medication movement, but it is a movement that will often
but not always, believe in using a much more moderate
amount of medication instead of the sometimes excessive tranquilization of
patients and institutions in Japan. From their perspective, so just
want to be upfront that I'm not coming out anti medication,
but I'm talking about how it can be used in
excess by society that wants to just lock people away

(22:55):
and not let them interact with the world. The Japanese
language around instaut utionalization doesn't even really translate to institutionalization,
but instead to detention. At least you're at this point
in the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, when it's kicking in
and it's big business. It is full of people cutting
costs at the expense of the care provided. There were
also I can't do an episode of the show without

(23:17):
somehow to point out that eugenics is a part of
every nightmare thing that's ever happened. There were at least
sixteen thousand non consensual sterilizations of patients, mostly of women,
during the twentieth century as Japan caught onto the West's
eugenics craze. Ironically, institutionalization in Japan and deinstitutionalization in the

(23:40):
West came from the same source. The first generation of
antipsychotic medications that showed up on the scene, like thorazine
actually a thing that I learned that I had no
idea a lot of the Western conception of a like
a drooling mental patient who wanders around or whatever. That's
actually a result of the medication, and that's a result

(24:00):
of thorisin.

Speaker 1 (24:02):
Right, and or the lobotomy.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, vitual electroshock. Yeah, it's not a result of mental illness.
It is a result of the things that people have
done to.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
Them, the treatment that they're like, this is going to
help them, Oh, this is just going to immobilize them completely,
let's do that.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah, totally. Thorisene allowed people to be a little bit
more stable, and so they were allowed out of the
institutions in the West. But in Japan it was like, oh,
thank god, we can finally afford to hospitalize people because
we don't need nearly as much medical staff since people
are more stable, like you used to need just a
higher percentage, like you needed more orderlies and stuff per

(24:38):
patient before Thorisen. Basically, you're also in post war Japan,
which is modernizing. People are moving into cities, people are
moving into nuclear family units, so you no longer have
a big rural family that can have a sell to
lock up your uncle or whatever in home prison. You
said that, so naturally, no, I know, it's funny because

(24:59):
it's like actually wrote a version of this paragraph before
I read about the like nineteen hundreds law about like
literally locking people up in the home. Like I thought
it was just like, oh, don't let uncle Dan out
he yells in public. But it's like no, really, no
Uncle Dan is in a cell. It just happens to
be in a family's house.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
Deinstitutionalization did hit Japan soon enough, starting around in the
nineteen eighties. It just didn't hit as hard. And this
was thanks to a bunch of different stuff. One of
them is second generation antipsychotics, which were generally better right.
One of them is because of budget cuts, and one
of the reasons is because of a movement towards patient

(25:39):
rights and autonomy. Also, a hospital turned out to have
been basically farming brains for research at a local university.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
See this is where the horror stories begin. Yeah, this
is where your horror movie you know that's coming.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, Like they caught a place where patients were missed
seriously dying and then other patients were getting told to
do the autopsies to remove their brains and then get
them to a research institution. And it was a big scandal.
I can't imagine why. Yeah, God, I if only there

(26:16):
was a show about bad stuff, I would totally do
a whole thing on that. But there's no shows about
bad things. People only like shows about good stuff. That's
why there's all the I'm trying to come up the
inverse of true good crimes. That's the whole thing. People
just tell really good stories about breaking laws but in
a good way.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Wasn't that John Krazinsky's whole thing about good news or something,
and then he sold it for a lot of money
when it was supposed to be like a free anyway.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah, good work if you can get it.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
Ah, God, I mean, good on you. Someone give me
money anyway. But yeah, we should have one of those
where we just talk about bad things. I do not
have a person who tells us all the besters of
the world.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, it's a shame that there's no podcast about like
what happens behind the bastards. So so that's the backdrop
of mental health in Japan. And I know less about
the twenty first century because my story most of what
I know ends at around twenty ten. I know some
stuff about like twenty fifteen. I know some of the

(27:17):
like really modern stuff, but only about Bethel House. So
that's the backdrop of mental health. But what about the
actual town that it's going to happen in. What about Urukawa.
Urukawa is this desolate small town in northern Japan. It
is full of abandoned buildings. It used to be you
could take trains for about fourteen hours from Tokyo to

(27:39):
reach it. But in twenty fifteen, See, I told you
I know some modern stuff. In twenty fifteen, I was
looking up how did people get there? Anyway? In twenty
fifteen the railroad was damaged by storms and no one
has fixed it. Oh no, there's a bus service that
gets there, but you can no longer take the train there.
Ten or twenty years ago, fifteen thousand people lived in
this town. Now it's down to twelve thousand. It's a

(28:04):
fairly fast rate of population decline. Why, I'll tell you, Okay,
we'll get there. It is remote both geographically and culturally.
It's on the southeastern coast of the island of Hokkaido,
which is that northernmost island of Japan and the second
biggest in the archipelago. Hakkaido is about the size of Ireland.

(28:26):
For people's comparison or Ireland is about the size of Hakkaido,
depending on where you're from. Urukawa means the river of
Fog in the Ainu language, and it feels sort of
symbolic of the whole thing that's going to happen there
in a weird way. But maybe I just like symbolism,
like you know, like I don't know, living in the

(28:47):
river of Fog is really interesting to do.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
I mean, you are a writer, so that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And I want to talk about
why Urukawa is not named in Japanese but instead of
i New language, because Akaido wasn't part of Japan until
the late eighteen hundreds until the Meiji Restoration. It was
a place where the indigenous I Knew people lived, mostly

(29:13):
hunting and fishing and not really farming at all. The
Iknew people have lived on the archipelago since at least
ten thousand years ago and are the indigenous popular and
an indigenous population. This is in contrast to the Yamato Japanese,
which is the main Japanese ethnic group that makes it
more than ninety eight percent of the population. The Imatto
mostly came over from the mainland about fifteen hundred years ago.

(29:36):
Haikaido was actually first colonized by the Russians, not the Japanese,
and the Japanese Empire was like, ah, fuck, no, you
can't have that. They can't come anywhere near here, so
they sort of counter colonized. This is not a defense
of what the Japanese did.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
So they were the first ones, is what you're trying
to say.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah, yeah, but they they did it a lot more
and worse because succeeded. The Russians probably would it too.
I don't know. The other thing that ties into all
of this area that's going to tie into today's story
is that Bethel House is vaguely Christian. It is not
officially religious at all, but Japanese Christianity is woven throughout

(30:17):
it and its story. And Bethel House started at a
church and many of its members are Christian. So now
we're gonna talk about Christianity in the region.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Oh good, I was gonna say. When you originally said
Bethel House, I imagined it would be like a Southern
children's home hmm, or a South Korean children's soul, like
something along those lines of which, like American people are
able to able to pick out their children, yeah, or
put away their children one of those two things.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
No, totally. I mean it's so funny because it's like
anytime you talk about anything with Christianity, you're about to
either describe some of the worst things that have ever
happened in the history of the world, or like an
oddly good thing that happened, you know.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
Yeah, yeah, because of the But yeah, bethel houses like
that is definitely not a Japanese term.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
No, it comes from Old Hebrew exactly. Yeah, Bethel means
house of God in Old Hebrew, which I think is
fun because then it means that Bethel house means house
of God house. And this amuses me about as much
as like table mesa in Colorado, which means table table,

(31:24):
and it makes me happy. They're like that masa is
particularly flat. Is like a table, looks like a table
that's neat. Yeah. So Christianity is very, very much a
minority religion in Japan. About one point five percent of
Japan as Christian, which is about the same percentage as

(31:44):
Muslims in the US. Muslims in the US are one
point three four percent, which means it's a minority, a
very small minority. But like you probably know you know
you are, or or know someone who is. You know,
it's not like an unheard of thing, right. Buddhism and
Shintoism are far more popular of religions. Christianity had a

(32:06):
rocky start in Japan. Some Catholics showed up in the
fifteen hundreds, and they ran into the problem that Catholics
run into everywhere. Local leaders did not want to share
power with a pope who lived far away. A bunch
of Catholics, mostly Japanese folks, with a few Europeans thrown in,
were crucified in fifteen ninety seven, and then not too
long after that, a bunch of Catholic peasants joined this

(32:27):
huge uprising against oppressive rule, and that led to forty
thousand people being beheaded in the Shimabara Rebellion, which is
one of those things I want to know more about
and maybe we'll get its own episodes one day. And
they weren't as is sort of popularly understood, as far
as far as I can tell, they weren't really like
the people who started the rebellion wasn't the Catholics, but
they joined in and it was like a bunch of peasants.

(32:49):
Catholics went deep underground for hundreds of years after that.
Christianity didn't really come back until the nineteenth century, and
then it was fairly repressed until the Allies forced freedom
of religion to Japan's new constitution after World War Two.
During the prosecution that they faced during the war, all
Christians in Japan were thrown together into a single organization
called the United Church of Christ in Japan. When I

(33:12):
read things like that, I'm like, but there's got to
been like some other group that was like nah or
her own thing.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
You know.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Whenever I read like an absolute or like a first
or something, I'm always skeptical. Right a Kaido where the
I Knew people lived the island up north, they had
their own religious practices. They were primarily animist. When Russia colonized,
they made a few, but not a ton of converts
to Russian Orthodoxy. So that's kind of where Christianity first

(33:39):
hits Hakaido. Then Japan invaded and drove out the Russians
and the indigenous I Knew people and forced Buddhism to
replace Christianity in the area. The Meiji government declared the
whole island empty and the property of the emperor. Empty Yeah, taranalis.

(34:00):
I know whether they actually use the Latin phrase, it's
always translated as terranolus, which is funny because it's not
an English phrase, but it's like a Latin phrase, you know. Yeah,
but yeah, the empty land. Nothing there, just some people
who've lived there.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
I don't really like colonization.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
I'm a huge fan.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, so much so that I love it. I'm just kidding.
I might even go so far as to say I'm
anti you know what, I know, the wild how could you?
The name Hakkaido means the road north, and that's what
Japan named it because they were like, this is a
stepping stone for the expansion of our empire, and the

(34:41):
Americans helped them do it. Yeah, the Americans who showed
up further started Christianizing a bit, which is really funny
because the Japanese like showed up and immediately were like
burning all the crosses and trying to get everyone out,
you know, all the like Christian stuff out. But then
they let Americans into help, and so then Americans started
bringing Christianity and then also kind of like all over

(35:02):
the world. One of the messier parts of colonization but
still not an okay thing is that the colonizers themselves
tended to be marginalized people, right, Like a lot of
the Japanese colonizers of South Korea were you know, poorer, right, right,
and like then went and became absolute evil bastards in
South Korea, and like, you know, the history of the

(35:23):
United States is a history of religiously persecuted minorities who
are terrible, right, although actually I think that the prosecution
that the Puritans faced is exaggerated.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
But that's my own Oh, like, that's a different conversation
we need to be having.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
I just really hate Oliver Cromwell because of what he
did to Ireland, and so like anytime that's fair, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
That's fair. I'm not white, so I don't have anything
to say to that, but you know what, I'm on
your side.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, okay, fair enough, whereas I have to get out
all my guilt as much as possible, you know, yeah,
I like it. So some of the people who showed
up toes Hakkaido were Japanese Christians, right, because mainland Japan
was like, we don't want you, get the hell out
of here, go displace some other people, and Hakaido isn't
like the hotbed of Christianity in Japan. I know, I've

(36:13):
just painted like three different ways that Christianity showed up there,
but like it still isn't like Western Japan has more
of the tiny Christian population. But that's how it ended
up there. And a bunch of Christian Japanese folks settled
a town called Urukawa at the close of the nineteenth century,
and so Urukawa has been a Christian town since its start.

(36:35):
But you know what, probably isn't religiously affiliated. And if
it is, it's because something slipped past our filters that
try to prevent political or religious ads. We said no
to that, our advertisers. I almost feel bad for our
advertisers because we like try to limit there's so many
categories of ads. We're like no, not that you know
that's true. We have to say no so often. Yeah,

(36:59):
but you should say no to these sweet sweet deals instead.
You should use your own critical thinking to determine whether
or not they are applicable to you. And we're back, okay,

(37:19):
And then to make all of this stuff about Christianity
and colonization even messier. Christianity was a major anti colonial
force in Hakkaido. Really Yeah, it wasn't a particularly radical
anti colonial force. It was a little bit more assimilationist.
But the Christian Inu movement fought for equal rights for
I New people in in a fairly assimilationist way, but

(37:42):
it built a lot of the I New pride. And
it's like I've run across this in a bunch of
different places where like some syncretic Christian practices will end
up being part of fighting against the Usually it's like
other Christian invaders, you know. So it's like both sides
are Christians now and they're fighting each other, you know.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
I mean, is it one of those where they're trying
to take credit for it, like take things from their
culture and its culture and being like, no, we did it.
Let me let me sell this for you.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
I don't know the book that I read, which I belie.
I got the impression that the author of the book
I read was probably not Christian, but was like trying
to be very respectful of the fact that Bethel is
Christian and a lot of what they know it's not Christian,
it has a lot of Christians in it, and like
that is like meaningful to a lot of its participants.

(38:31):
So I couldn't tell you for certain, because then the
other thing that's complicated, right, is that often anti colonial
stuff it's Christian is people of the indigenous group who
are Christian doing those things.

Speaker 1 (38:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
We tend to think of like the Christian as like
just the invader themselves, right, the colonizer, the missionary, right,
But it's like they're very often also people from that
region who have taken on this religion. I it's messy,
and I suspect that part of the reason they did

(39:05):
the kind of Christian version. It probably helped that Christianity
was a marginalized religion in Japan, but it was one
with a lot of international support. So I feel like
it might have been like a like, hey, we're tied
into the bigger world too, right, right, This is conjecture
on my part. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
I mean, the missionaries they knew what they were doing.
They are successful for a reason in that spreading of
Western Christianity. The amount of like propaganda that is tied
to it, as well as the work, as well as
like of course like you know, oh, we're here to
help you, but you also have to believe Jesus, like
we'll give you food if you say you're a follower

(39:46):
of Jesus.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
So totally they knew what they were doing. Yeah, Now,
I would like I would absolutely read just an entire
book about specifically the Christian I knew movement and how
it does and doesn't relate to anti colonial movement, you know.
But I would need to read one that isn't just
Christian propaganda like you know, right, but also one that
isn't just like specifically anti Christian propaganda, you know. Yeah. Anyway,

(40:11):
I suspect I will need to learn how to read
more languages before I can do much more of the
scholarly work that I would like to do. Also, one
more thing I want to say about I new culture,
because actually most of the people are not getting marked
by their ethnicity and the stuff that I'm reading. But
I do know that a lot of new people were
involved in early Bethel House, and so the implication is
that this town that was settled by Japanese Christians also

(40:32):
had an a new population and they're like part of
all of this. But I don't know the ethnicity of individuals.
And to set the scene about how mental health was
treated differently in Hakkaido as compared to mainland Japan, and
I knew culture there was a condition someone could have
called EMU. I am you, and this is basically to

(40:56):
be sort of possessed, have seizures, speak in voices, stuff
like this. But it wasn't considered a sickness, nora a
like magic power of the everything's amazing whatever. Right, it
was just a thing that happens, and it overlaps with
shamanism within their you know, within their culture, right, but
it's it isn't the same. Not everyone with this is

(41:18):
a shaman. Not every shaman has this, like whatever. If
a leader has IMU, they aren't like taken out of leadership.
They're just ignored and or sometimes laughed at while they're
under the immediate effects. So it's just seeing as like, well,
I don't know, some people just like do stuff that's different, okay,
m hm. And I really like that. I really like
how it's not like because there's this I'll get to

(41:40):
it in a second. And then interestingly, people under EMU
aren't held liable for their actions under it. Right, it
was used by people, especially marginalized women, to speak out
about what was happening to them, and then it was
also used by the Anu to speak out against Japanese imperialism,

(42:01):
and I would say that there's this this over emphasis
in pop anthropology to be like, oh, in pre civilized culture,
neurodiversion people were all like shamans and respected, right, But
there's a kernel of truth, but not a lot of truth.
It's like just way messier. A lot of neurodiversion people
were like killed or shunned. It's completely different between every
different society, right, and other times people were accepted and

(42:23):
not seen a special for it just different. Other times
individuals might end up wind up as shamans as a
result of their ability to perceive things differently. And it
is complicated instead of simple. You look skeptical, you.

Speaker 1 (42:37):
Know, just waiting. Oh, I don't know why. I do
feel like I feel like every now and then when
I listen, especially when it comes to like the imperialism
and all the culture, and I'm like, is it I
know your stories are good, but yet I'm still waiting
for the sad parts.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Oh yeah, fair enough. Yeah, No, there's not actually, I
mean the sad part here is like what's not quite
being written directly textually, which is the like I know
people are oppressed as shit, right, right, right, That's what
I'm like, Yeah, no, they are sorry. And sometimes it's
like it's funny because I'm like in my head, I'm like, well,
everyone knows colonization is bad. I don't need to get
into the details. But it's like there are so many

(43:14):
things from like the nineteen thirties where people are like
fortunately I knew people will be completely gone in two generations, right,
or like like people just like being like I can't
wait till that language is gone. And the language is
considered critically endangered, and it's also a language isolate, like
no one has a route that they claim, no one
can trace it to a different pre right.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
We did an episode about indigenous women and Native women
trying to save languages, and of course we didn't make it.
I didn't make it all the way. It was so
hard that just trying to be in like North America
and talking about the different languages that people and especially
women Native women are trying to save. It is intense
and the fact that like a lot of governments have

(43:58):
blocked the ability for those communities to call it a
language in general, like an actual language, yeah, to be saved,
And it makes me really sad, But yeah, this site
makes complete sense obviously, because you have to have I
forgot the number, just like much of everything I research.
After I talked about it, it goes out of my head. Yeah, numbers,

(44:20):
But like it has to be like thousands and thousands
of people who speak currently speak the language fluently, Like
it can't just be your learning you had no a
few things. It has to be like fluent that could
be your first language. For them to call that a
language to preserve it's so sad. It's so sad because
all of it's so beautiful, I know, and.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Like I cannot imagine looking at the world and being
like I wish there was less diversity here. You didn't know,
like do you just want to be bored? I don't
get it, Like the world is so clearly better when
there are like so many languages and so many different
ways of being people, and like I just I can't

(45:03):
wrap my head around it.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
I can't either. I mean, honestly, when we talked about
when I was on the last time we were talking
about the Teano people, that kind of started like the
opening the rabbit hole of like, yeah, I don't know
much about this culture, and then talking about how they're
trying to preserve their language and how difficult it's been
in being able to use any type of federal funds
or actual get assistance to be able to say their language.

(45:27):
And then we're talking about obviously the people of Hawaii
and all of their language, as well as the fact
that Mallori people were I think the most successful of
being able to preserve their language, and a lot of
people are trying to follow their model. But it's it's
really sad and I hate it.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
No, I agree, I hate it. Have you ever seen
the movie Kneecap No, It's about an Irish language hip
hop group.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
I don't know how to feel about this. Keep going.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
I am in favor. I think it's okay. One thing
that is because, like, the Irish language is a language
that has been attempted to be destroyed through colonization, and
the thing that ended up happening is that basically, like
people actually wanted to use the language in day to
day life. So all of the like proper groups who
want to like save Irish as a language were like, no,

(46:18):
don't do anything improper, don't be like, don't be making
up new words for drugs and fucking and things like that, right,
and then here come people being like, no, we're just
gonna talk about our lives in the way that we
like to and like in the culture that we're part
of or whatever. And so there's this movie that's like
a it's kind of a biopic about a band that
actually exists, and it's just about Northern Ireland attempts to

(46:40):
save Irish in this like kind of interesting cultural way,
and like how it negatively reflects on both the IRA
and the British government and how they try and control
things anyway, and they do it through hip hop, they do.
And Okay, so that's the point, No, I know. And
it's interesting because I like, this is like easy for

(47:01):
me to say as a white person. I think in
the I think in the United States it's a different
thing to be a white rapper, whereas like kind of
everywhere else I've ever like been or read too much about,
it's just sort of the music medium of like the
underclasses and the people who like who are living in
poverty and rebelling against stuff. Just because like race works

(47:22):
so differently in every country, you know, right, it does,
But I could be wrong. I'm not trying to be
like and that's why, Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
No, no, no, Like that's like I think that it
makes more sense to like counter colonization and what the
British essentially has stolen for so many years or try
to oppress. That would be a good reason to take
on a hip hop culture. Like that makes sense because
that's kind of what hip hop was countering, the colonization

(47:49):
and racism in the you know, in the US. So
that makes more sense as a verse to like K
pop idols who rap and really think they know what
they're doing and then they say inappropriate things and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, yeah,
you're not allowed to rap anymore. You're not allowed to
say you're hip hop anymore?

Speaker 2 (48:07):
You no, no, no, yeah, yeah no that's fair. Oh
that's interesting because it's like I know so little about
modern Korean culture. I did this like long deep dive
on like Korean revolutionary politics in like the early twentieth century,
so I like know way more about like Korea while
it was colonized than I do like once it was divided.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
You know. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's definitely two different stories,
but I mean, yeah, fair enough, we are today too,
and that could all come back to, like the imperialism
and the influence that the US has over South Korea
and all the things that they have taken on as marketability. Yeah,
but we will we will drop that here because I

(48:47):
know when we come back.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
All right, we're not gonna do with the whole K
pop section right now. All right, okay, all right, but
we can talk about Okawa, the small town on the
southeastern coast of Hokkaidoawa. It was started by Japanese colonists
who were Christian, although again like I actually I think
some of these people were also I knew, but I'm
not certain because I know later in the nineteen eighties

(49:09):
a lot of the people who were involved in the
story or I knew near Urkawa. A church was built
in eighteen eighty six. In Urukawa proper, a little tiny
wooden prayer house was built that fit about twelve people
and had no insulation. It was just four walls and
a roof. And that's going to later be the spoiler,
or that's going to become the first Bethel House. Urkawa

(49:30):
today has one main street about two miles long that
follows the ocean. It's the kind of place that has
like a main store where people get their things, but
other stores are around two And I can like in
my mind like because like twelve thousand people is like
it's actually more than twice as big as the city
that I live near. But I live in nowhere, West Virginia,
so this isn't really a meaningful way of perceiving it.

(49:54):
The economy there was always about half fishing and seaweed
and half horses. The town's mascot were twin horses. Urukawa
was the place where the emperor's own horses were bred
before World War Two. Now there's a racehorse industry there,
but that industry is dying, and I think climate change
is fucking with the fishing too. And the population as

(50:16):
old as hell. There's a ton of retirees. Young people
have all fled for bigger cities. You asked me like
thirty minutes ago, I had Shrinkeen. It's just rural. I mean,
it's literally the same story of where I live. You know,
the like extract stuff from the nature is kind of
going away, and everyone young leaves.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
Yeah, I'm sure with climate change on no small islands
like that get really impacted by weather and storms and
all as such, so I'm sure that could be a
part of the conversation too.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
Yeah, there's a psychiatric there's a general hospital there actually
with a psychiatric wing, and it's called Urukawa Red Cross Hospital,
and it's sort of central to our story. It has
a nurse training program, which is the only reason any
medical professionals end up there, and they mostly leave when
they graduate. There's also that church, which is affiliated with
the United Church of Christ in Japan, and for decades

(51:14):
at a time it didn't have a pastor. The congregants
all like twelve of them. We just kind of do
their own thing, their own way, and then like once
a month or something, someone will like kind of come through, right,
But quite often the services were led by members of
Bethel House. Later, once Bethel House exists and it focuses
more on singing and communal meals than sermons, and they

(51:36):
had this attitude that here we do things our own way,
and that's how it kind of began. And I guess
we could say there's a bunch of people you can
point to and be like, oh, these are the people
who start at Bethel House. One of them is a
guy named mister Mukayachi. He was this poor Christian kid.
His mom had converted, and so he did too, and
he worked his way through social work school in Sapporo,

(51:58):
the city in Hakkaido mostly known as the place where
the beer comes from to people who live in America.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
In nineteen seventy eight, fresh out of school, he went
to go work for the Red Cross Hospital in Irakawa,
and he was the facility's only social worker, which has
to be a nightmare job. Social work is already like
a nightmare job for heroes, you know, right. He borrowed
money from his parents to get a suit for the interview,
and then in order to get a ticket to go

(52:24):
to his job for the first time, to like move
to the town, he had to pawn his like English
language dictionary for a place to stay. He showed up
and he was like, I can't afford to live anywhere,
And so he went to the church and he was like,
can I sleep in the uninsulated church? And they were
like yeah, sure. And soon enough, together with some ex
patients from the hospital, he started leading a group called

(52:46):
the Acorn Society, and that was part of his social work.
In nineteen eighty, a new church was built, and a
minister showed up, the first regular minister they'd had in years,
and his name was Reverend Miajima. Peple in town were porous,
fuck including the congregation, many of them were I knew,
and the minister drove around to pick up local kids

(53:07):
to make sure they got fed. And I think that
this gets into that like thing, right, where like Christians
either show up and are like, well, if you're Christian,
will feed you, or they're just like, well, I'm Christian,
so ill feed you. And that's the kind I could
put up with, right, versus the like mm hmm, you
better cross the eyes and dots some teas or whatever, right, right,
And that's like again part of why Bethel House is like,
we are not a Christian organization, right, You do not

(53:28):
have to be Christian to be part of any of us.
I feel like I'm like going on about the Christianity
part more than I expected to, probably because like when
I first started, I was like, huh, you know.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
Yeah, well, I mean again, there's a deep history of
missionaries and colonization, especially everywhere, but Asia was a big
part of it, Japan, Korea, China. We know, like the
stories and the harrowing, they're all dying Christians are being persecuted.
Type of conversations that I heard the most were from
like China, Japan, and Korea, when they first we're doing

(54:01):
all that work, and then later realizing, oh, but also
colonization was happening, and this is part of the way
they were colonizing areas or bringing influences, their influences, and
especially like when we talk about African countries, those poor
African kids that need Jesus. So it's hard not to
at least talk about if they're not bad influences, why

(54:23):
explaining how they're not that's important a conversation. So I
get it.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
I think they've earned that reputation where you kind of
have to start from negative and be like, hey, no,
like actual, isn't that bad?

Speaker 1 (54:33):
We promise they were the cool Christians.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah, these people were like genuinely looking at the like
what if we take care of each other part and
not of the like everyone who doesn't do the following
will burn in hell forever part, you know. Oh yeah,
And so the church soon became a sort of clubhouse
for ex patients. About twenty people would show up for
monthly dinners and several people started living in the building,
and in nineteen eighty three a guy named Kiyoshi Hayasaka

(54:58):
moved in and he was a former pay and he
was a schizophrenic. He is one of the founders of
Bethel House and he's actually he gets presented as like
the mascot of Bethel House and his like faces on
some of their merchant stuff. But like in a way
he's like totally in on this. Isn't a like okay,
like that's the whole thing, is all of this, Oh man,
we're gonna talk about it. They do really interesting stuff
where they like they sell merch with their delusions on it.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
That's creative. I mean, y'are fair half the people that
write and make movies. I'm sure it's something, whether it's
bipolar or schizophrenia and narcissism, like yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Totally, yeah there. It's so hard. The like the overlap
between like madness and creativity and art and stuff is
so real but complicated, like people play it up, you know.
But right, there's also like something about being like, well,
I'm trying to tap into something that doesn't exist to
create something that has never existed before, you know, Right,

(55:53):
But this guy Kiyoshi shows up. In nineteen eighty four,
people got together to fix up the old church, to
insulate it and add more living space, and the reverend
called this place Bethel House, House of God House. It
was named though, after a place that I now want
to know more about. The reason is called Bethel House
is not actually even a reference to Christianity. It is

(56:15):
called Bethel House because there was a Bethel Institution in Germany,
which was a psychiatric facility that resisted the Nazi attempts
to kill all of its patients.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Huh, I did not know that?

Speaker 2 (56:27):
Yeah, no, I didn't either, And I ran across that
one sentence, and now I have this like seed that
I hope will turn into an episode one day.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
I'll be back, call me back.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Yeah, well, it's funny because I already have another story
about like that. I'm kind of starting to do the
research on about communist and anarchists who ran a psychiatric
facility in France that turned it into a like gorilla
operating stage for fighting the Nazis.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
Anyway, so maybe I'll do a whole like psychiatric Patients
against Nazis episode. I love it, And the original Bethel House.
This isn't a like wholesome story to the most of
the people who live in this town. Right at the time, Yeah, yeah,
this is the place that the like dangerous and skitz
to quotes but only half quotes the dangerous schizophrenics and

(57:13):
alcoholics live, right. It had a bad reputation. Parents told
their kids to stay away from this place, right. And
then all of these people who live there, they really
struggled to hold down jobs. Right, that was like part
of their whole issue, right, Society didn't isn't really set
up for people who are going to like freak out
and yell and break stuff, you know. And they all

(57:35):
started finding work. And this is actually where it gets
into interesting like women's work. Right. A lot of women
in town packaged seaweed at home as piecework, and then
it was shipped out all over Japan basically like a
seaweed plant would just send out all of the seaweed
to be dried and packaged in individual homes. And so

(57:56):
it was like a housewife job, right, and everyone's like
pool or so everyone has to be working. Then all
of a sudden, starting by originally I think helping like
the minister's wife, they all start packaging seaweed, and that
becomes like the start of them working. But whenever you're like, oh,
this person who has a hard time holding down other jobs,

(58:17):
and now we can just exploit them through work, right,
this is like a thing that happens a lot. But
they circumnavigate that problem. In nineteen eighty nine they expanded.
There were a lot of patients in the hospital and
a lot of elderly folks in town, and they had
a lot of unmet needs. In particular, patients weren't provided
with adult diapers in the hospital, So Bethel House started

(58:40):
welfare Shop Bethel and they started selling diapers and other
stuff like that, and then would like deliver do home
delivery to elderly folks who couldn't go out and get
what they needed. And they are like aggressively, they're not nonprofit.
They're aggressively not caring about profit. And we'll talk about
that a little bit later too. Eventually they wound up
run the hospital's laundry and dishwashing facilities too, and then

(59:02):
they sell stuff directly in the hospital and they start
developing the culture of Bethel House that is going to
shape so much of it in the future. And also
like again, stuff that I find really interesting no matter what.
For example, they eschewed rigid rules. Iki Yoshi, the social
worker guy, put it quote, Bethel House doesn't have any

(59:26):
of the rule books or management manuals that other organizations do.
If we did have those types of rules and regulations,
then we felt everything could be answered by looking it
up in the regulations. Every individual act of generosity or
thought might end up being squelched and then working under it.
Here's where I thought I was segueing to a second ago.
Now I one can see the inner mind of me

(59:47):
as I build my scripts. It's so much work in
a week. I think people probably know that. But it
is so much work in a week. Uh. Anyway, working
under someone else's management feels paternalistic too, and it doesn't
help develop the agency of the members. How are you
supposed to develop a free thinking person if you have

(01:00:09):
a boss telling you what to do all the time.
So reasonably early on, right, they're getting this piecemeal work
from the big seaweed factory. One of the members picked
a fight with the boss of the larger company that
was hiring them, just like kind of had an outburst
and was like, fuck you man, or whatever. You know,
So Bethelhouse lost all their orders, so they started their

(01:00:30):
own seaweed business. Yeah, and they didn't even like they're
actually referencing a different cultural concept than worker ownership, but
they use it to create worker ownership. All of them
own the place that they're you know, it's run by them.
Developing agency is at the core of what they do
for the members. For example, Ikeyoshi said, quote, it's no

(01:00:53):
good if people think that I cured them. We're always
noting that people who think we cured them all relapse,
rather than being like, you're cured now. Healing comes from
the individual in the community, not something that is granted
to them by experts. They also don't see cures at all.
They work on managing their problems instead. The problem isn't

(01:01:16):
the schizophrenia. The problem is is the way that the
schizophrenia attracts from their experience of living basically, and that's
both like how society treats them, but also the symptoms
of schizophrenia even without society or sometimes very undesirable, you know,
m So you take enough medication to manage the symptoms
without trying to cure yourself by numbing yourself completely. In it. Actually, oddly,

(01:01:39):
in a way, I think the fact that alcoholism is
included in the psychiatric disorders in Japanese culture ends up
advantageous to this because you don't cure alcoholism, you live
in recovery. People attempt to live in recovery with their
mental illness through Bethelhouse. And then this is like my

(01:02:00):
favorite part, but that's because of my own Actually that's funny.
Of that's to say, like, I, okay, well I'll just
say what I'm gonna say. So they have this agency
building ethic, and then they build this kind of like
slacker worker owner ethic. They run a ton of worker
owned businesses, but these are not grind set types. And
I was like being like, hey, isn't that amazing. But

(01:02:22):
I'm like, I'm a total I work all the time.
I'm constantly working.

Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
People who say that and then do creative las never
stop working.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
No, I yeah, I'm just always working. I like, I
don't want to have conversations with people if it's not
about stuff that we both want to work on. It
could be about what the other person's working on. It
doesn't have to be about me.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
But let's just talk about this. Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
And so they have this like whole slew of little
slogans like we want a workplace where you can goof
off without fear and weakness binds us together. And let's
value our lack of profits and don't try too hard,

(01:03:02):
and don't try to fix your illness by yourself, and
just letting it be is good enough.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
And I'm just saying these are all just like fire mantras.
I think we are coming back to understanding. Yeah, yeah,
these are the sayings that we need to be breathing
to ourselves, especially the day this is released, so I know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
And then here's the last one that I wrote down.
There's a bunch more. You're right on schedule. Oh ah,
so validating when it like like I would have my
like when I first got like an office job, my
friend bought me a Garfield mug this as I hate
mondays it's like a to make fun of me. I
would have a mug that says, let's value our lack

(01:03:45):
of profits. Bethelhouse, if you sell that, I will buy it.
No one else. Make that to be clear. They they
deserve the profit even though it's about lack of profit.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
Absolutely, And as.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
For all the other good stuff, they're gonna do like
reshape the way that psychiatric care and study is done
in Japan with that self study stuff that I promised.
We're going to talk about that on Wednesday. Oh man,
well you don't have to wait that long. You only
have to wait long enough for me to like go
get more water. But before even that, people can listen

(01:04:21):
to about you then the things that you want to.

Speaker 1 (01:04:23):
Plug about me and the things I want to plug. Yes,
I am on a podcast called Stuff Mom Never Told
You with my co host Ay, and we talk about
all the things that I've mentioned at the very beginning.
We did a recent we did several interviews, including one
with Michelle Norris, who she's fabulous, and we got to
have a whole conversation about food and how that turns

(01:04:47):
into memories, how that could actually help in these conversations,
especially talking about racial conversations, so wonderful stuff like that.
We also talk about Star Wars and The Last of
Us a lot, so there you go find us there.
I'm also on Blue Sky McVeigh Sam, I'm on Instagram

(01:05:07):
McVeigh Sam. I think it's all of them because you know,
I couldn't get the original handles and you can see
pictures of my dog and maybe me, but more of
my dog.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Dog is always the more important part of social media.
That's the thing I've learned obviously. Yeah. Well, if you
want to know more about what I well, okay, so
I have a book that's going to come out. I
know I just said this last year, but there's a
different book. I have a book coming out this June
from Strangers in Tangle Wilderness and it is the third
book in the Daniel Kine series. It is called The
Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice because I believe that I

(01:05:38):
should name all of my books as if they are
metal albums. And it is the third book in the
Daniel Kine series. I think I already said that, And
it's going to kickstart in March, but you can sign
up now for notifications for when it kickstarts. And as
part of that, we're probably going to do audiobooks of
all three of the books, because audiobooks have never been
produced of them. But if you want to hear me
read the first book, go back to the very first

(01:06:00):
episodes of Cool Zone Media book Club and listen to
me read Robert Evans, The Lamb Will Slaughter The Lion
to hear, Danielle Kine introduced. But that's the thing that
I'm going to be plugging for a while, so get
used to it. And also, good luck and take care
of each other. I hope today didn't lead to what

(01:06:21):
Hitler did where he rounded up all of his opponents
and killed them immediately. And if so, then we're in
more trouble. But that probably didn't happen. And you know
whether or not it happened, but I don't. Isn't it
wild that you the listener have more information than me,
the person recording, just by sheer nature of being in
the future while I am in the past. Although then

(01:06:42):
there's like a larger picture thing about the fact that
I'm always in the past, because I know, for example,
way more about nineteen ten Korea than twenty twenty five Korea.

Speaker 1 (01:06:52):
Twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
I probably know more about nineteen ten America than twenty
twenty five America at this point. Uh. Anyway, we'll catch
you all on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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