Government greed, inaction hinders Second Harvest Japan

[Taro Toporific]

Hurting Japan's hungry
Government greed, inaction hinders NPO efforts to help needy
THE ZEIT GIST, The Japan Times: Jan. 18, 2005
'We got kicked out of Sumida park three times for delivering food. I went to talk to the people in Taito-ku ward office and basically (it) came down to, 'well, you just can't deliver food here anymore,' " says Charles McJilton, executive director of Second Harvest Japan.
"I said, we both have an issue here. You have hungry people there, and we want to feed them. We don't want to create problems for your people in the park. How can we work together? And he didn't want to work together.
Second Harvest Japan (formerly Food Bank Japan) is one of the nation's 16,000-odd incorporated nonprofit organizations (NPOs).....
.... "The homeless are only 25 percent of the people we donate to. There's 240,000 people here in Japan who don't have enough to eat every day. The homeless are only 50,000 of those people."