“I discovered that animals are placed in far worse situations, are treated far worse than humans. So I really started to put a stronger focus on the treatment of animals.”
When Chihiro Okada was a young student in Japan she imagined she might one day work in the field of human rights, perhaps tackling world hunger. But then, as a member of her school’s newspaper, she worked on a story about pets. The story brought her to local animal shelters and pounds where she learned just how many homeless companion animals in Japan are euthanized. She was shocked, she says through an interpreter.
Ms. Chihiro Okada, Director of Animal Rights Centre Japan. Photo by Itsuka Yakumo / #unboundproject / We Animals.
“I discovered that animals are placed in far worse situations, are treated far worse than humans. So I really started to put a stronger focus on the treatment of animals.”
Today Okada is the director of Animal Rights Centre Japan (ARCJ), the country’s most impactful organization for animal advocacy. The work of the group, under Okada’s leadership, highlights much of the progress being made for animals in Japan in the last two decades, and a slow but steady cultural shift.
After Okada’s revelation about the ill-treatment of companion animals in Japan, she started university with a new attention on animals. She traveled and studied abroad, first to Canada, where she visited more animal shelters, then to Australia, where she recalls meeting a teacher who was vegetarian. “That was then I thought, ‘ok there’s a lot more I can do regarding my interest toward animals,’” she recalls. And upon returning to Japan she quickly connected with ARCJ and began transitioning toward being vegan.
On her first day as a volunteer with ARCJ, Okada was told to read a particular book by someone named Peter Singer. The book, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, published in 1975, is of course now considered a pioneering text on animal rights, but to Okada it was new, profound and put into words all that she was already feeling.
At that time, she recalls, there were no groups in Japan focusing on farmed animal welfare. Rather, ARCJ’s eye was fixed on banning animal testing and fur fashion. The group ran campaigns and organized large protests and marches; and since 2005, when ARCJ began campaigning against fur, Okada reports there has been a 94% decrease in the importation of fur products. “We can say that is a clear sign of success.” And even better, she says, was the closure of Japan’s last fur farm in 2016, effectively ending the fur industry in the country.
Historical photo provided by ARCJ.
Today Okada has been with ARCJ for twenty years, 17 of those in the role of director, and she and her team have shifted focus.
“The biggest issue that we believe needs to be tackled in Japan today is the treatment of farmed animals,” she says. “There are no other organizations like us currently working on these issues, both to improve the overall status of animal welfare in Japan, as well as working toward the overall decrease of animal farming.”
The group does this via consumer and corporate education, and lobbying for change. Last year, ARCJ was able to stop a legal proposal to ban free range chicken farming. ARCJ also advocates for increased production and availability of plant-based foods by speaking with food producers, grocers, restaurants, and hotels.
“Recently, more major companies here have been taking action toward doing something veggie or plant-based; it’s grown into a bigger range than we ever could have hoped for,” says Okada.
And Okada has been able to fulfill a personal goal of creating a “strong, nationwide animal rights action network,” of people and groups all around the country to share information and resources. “People now know they can come to us, contact us about anything animal rights related.”
Looking toward the future of animal advocacy in Japan, Okada says her next ambitions are to see the use of battery cages and sow stalls end by 2030, and see food producers increase their range of animal-free foods, “to at least half of what they are producing,” she says, “within my lifetime.” But her greatest goal, she says, is to “pass this organization down, eventually, to the next person who can make this group into a huge social movement all around Japan that works toward the end of speciesism and the mistreatment of all animals.”
For now, Okada and ARCJ are pleased to see that the issue of animal treatment is finally permeating the popular culture, and that animal welfare is now a term and idea that the people of Japan are coming to understand.
“Five years ago when we said ‘animal welfare’ –which is an English word that we’ve made into Japanese—many people did not know what it meant. Since then we’ve been able to raise politicians’ and consumers’ awareness about factory farming,” she says. “We’ve been able to spread the fundamental understanding of what animal welfare is.”
What began as Okada’s small story on pets has blossomed into organized advocacy for all animals in Japan.
Written by Jessica Scott-Reid
Photographs by Itsuka Yakumo (with exception of the historical ARCJ photo)
