Page 172 - The Drucker Lectures

The Era of the Social Sector [ 153

which that village or that han [local fief] took responsibility for
the local needs.
Long before there was compulsory education in Japan, the
country was almost completely literate—the first nation in the
world to have universal literacy. That was the result of a hun-
dred years of volunteer-based, nonprofit institutions in which
in every han, the bunjin [the literati] started schools. Most of
them were poorly supported by the daimyo [feudal lords], but
largely supported by the community, some for samurai [the war-
rior class] only, many more for anybody who was willing to work
hard. I don’t know whether you know, but every single one of
the men who built Meiji [the period from 1868 to 1912 in which
Japan rose to be a world power] came out of one of those bunjin
schools—volunteer, nonprofit, local organizations.
So you have an enormously rich tradition. Next to the United
States, where we have an enormous tradition of community ser-
vice built around the church, you in Japan may have the richest
tradition of community organization, of community association,
of nonprofit organizations. Now is the time to rediscover it and put
it to work again because government cannot do it. In the next 20
or 30 years, governments are not going to become stronger unless
they become dictatorships. They will become weaker. They have
taken on too many things. They have outgrown their financial
resources. You in Japan are the only country that is not bankrupt.
Every other government in the developed world is bankrupt and
cannot raise taxes. If they do, it will only create inflation or reces-
sion. They have to retrench, and they cannot take on new tasks.
Besides, these are not tasks that government is good at. These are
tasks that have to be done in the local community.
We are talking of something that is neither government nor
business. We in the United States and the West began about 60
or 70 years ago to talk of the two sectors: the “private sector,”
which is business, and the “public sector” that is government.