Japanese men and women of all ages are increasingly spending their spare time engaging in a variety of volunteer work, ranging from restoring traditional "minka" wooden houses in the countryside to recycling secondhand computers.
The number of volunteers has surged since the second half of the 1990s to 6.96 million as of April 1999, according to the Japanese Council of Social Welfare. Its survey in 1996 found homemakers accounted for 42 percent of the total number of volunteers at the time, followed by retirees at 16 percent.
A wide-ranging network of salaried workers, self-employed people and architects is striving to halt the disappearance of the minka -- the pinnacle of traditional Japanese dwelling culture now threatened by depopulation of the countryside and the aging of society.