Kyota Ono
General manager
 ITSUMO Multi-functional Office

ITSUMO Multi-functional Office opened its doors in April 2019. We run a traditional sweet shop and a tinned food café, take orders for odd jobs, and help farmers. While doing these things, we work to enable people with disabilities to achieve “the things which adults take for granted”.

 ITSUMO’s main business is projects providing care in daily life. Our users are mostly people with severe intellectual disabilities. Through the traditional sweet shop or taking orders for odd jobs, these people interact with the other members of the local community and play their part in supporting that community.

Severe disabilities limit a person’s options for the future. After we graduate from senior high school, we can choose from various different paths, but children with severe intellectual disabilities attending special needs schools only have one path, projects providing care in daily life. Moreover, there are not so many such centres to choose from in Chiba City. In addition, the content of the activities carried out by most of these projects providing care in daily life are very similar. Therefore, we decided that if we were going to set up ITSUMO, at the very least, we wanted to create a format that offered options within projects providing care in daily life.

The concept with which we came up, then, was “the things which adults take for granted”. We thought “What do adults take for granted?” “We work during the day, don’t we?” “We meet various people, right?” We started by making connections with the local residents, finding out about the local community, and thinking about the potential: what we could do, and what people with disabilities could do. The types of work which came out of this process were taking orders for odd jobs and running a traditional sweet shop.

Taking orders for odd jobs means taking care of small problems brought to us by local residents at a rate of 100 yen for 5 minutes. These tasks – taking out rubbish, carrying loads, washing windows, weeding, and so on – are all things which even severely disabled people can do accompanied by a member of staff. Most of our requests come from elderly people: through these odd jobs, I have experienced for myself just how many people in the community find even very small things difficult. Moreover, there are elderly ladies who always give us tea and sweets once the job is done, people who bring us refreshments and tell us to take a break even though the work is not yet finished, or users and staff who talk for so long each time that it is hard to get home – as we engage with one another, I feel that besides the material problem, there is also an element of needing things which cannot be seen, such as engagement and connection. From now on, as summer approaches, this is the time of year when we get more work. I am looking forward to being able to meet various people.

We created a traditional sweet shop within our office. Our members who are not physically strong, have difficulty walking or carrying out tasks, cannot talk well, but love engaging with people work in the sweet shop. The best way for our members who cannot easily get out to engage with the people outside is to have those people come here. When we were researching the local community, we learned that there were many children, and so a traditional sweet shop was the perfect way to ensure use by the local community and make it easy for ordinary people to come into our office.

After the shop had just opened, the children who came kept themselves somewhat at a distance – when our users tried to engage with them by giving them a high five, or just by handing them their sweets, the children evaded them or backed away. I think they had probably never come into contact with a person with a disability before. Nevertheless, as we ran the sweet shop day after day, the number of customers gradually began to increase. After getting to know ITSUMO and our users, the children also started to return their high fives and to chat in a friendly way with the users who handed them their sweets, telling them “That guy who always pushes us to buy more sweets is here again!” The sweet shop is now a place for children to gather each day after school. And at ITSUMO, it is completely normal for people with disabilities to be part of the scene.

I have rambled on a bit about ITSUMO without coming to a conclusion, but it is our group which runs this kind of activities near to Tsuga station in Chiba City. From this year, we have also opened “mazekoze” to provide care in daily life, taking on a new challenge. We are looking forward to seeing how the community and the facility develop.

State of candy store