A sewing machine buzzes on a square wooden table, surrounded by scissors, fabric rulers and tidy piles of cloth. Three boxes of handmade crafts such as sachets and hair bands sit on the floor.

It is Wednesday afternoon, the time when dozens of Japanese women gather at an apartment on Shuicheng Road South in Changning district. Once a week, the women get together to make cellphone pendants, storage bags and other handmade crafts, which they sell, along with some secondhand goods, to raise money for charity.

These women belong to Friend, a Japanese charitable organization in Shanghai. The group is made up of about 50 Japanese housewives who accompanied their husbands to China.

Every Wednesday, before picking up their children from school, they spend several hours on crafts. They later sell the items at a charity bazaar on Yili Road in Changning district. "At first some of us felt a bit embarrassed to hawk our wares on the roadside," said 45-year-old Makoto Kimishima, a Friend member who helped out at the group's last sale in early June.

Embarrassment aside, the group has succeeded in raising money. Since it started 17 years ago, its members have donated 1.47 million yuan ($237,058) to charities that help impoverished Chinese children, according to the group's pamphlet. Their donations have helped build four new primary schools in rural China.

Friend was founded in Shanghai by Kaoru Shinji and four of her friends. Shinji said that Friend's first charity event took place in June 1997, two months after the group was established. It was a charity sale on Shuicheng Road South.

Each year, many Japanese women accompany husbands who have been dispatched to Shanghai by their companies. Kimishima was one of them. She came to the city in 1999. She began participating in Friend's charitable activities, largely as a way to give back to society. "My kids are receiving a good education in this city, and they are living a very good life," she told the Global Times. "But I know that in China, there are lots of children whose family are too poor to send them to school."

In 2010, Kimishima and about 10 members of Friend visited a village in northwestern China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, where the group had donated 300,000 yuan for the construction of a new elementary school. She brought her two sons on the trip.

"It was hard to imagine how the people were able to live there," she said. "There were no trees, no rain, let alone running water. The village had been suffering from a long drought. All we saw there were dust-covered hills."

With Friend's help, the village's 150 school children could have classes in a new brick building, instead of a worn-down mud-brick structure, Kimishima said. The trip also served as a lesson for her boys. "My sons heard how the children in the village can take a bath only three or four times a year, so they learned something about saving water," she said.

In more recent years, Friend has focused on improving students' learning environments, rather than building schools in remote areas. In 2013, the group donated 80,000 yuan to build kitchens at two primary schools in Ningxia and Hubei Province. Earlier this year, it bought shoes and sports equipment for more than 200 students at an elementary school in Anhui Province. "Nowadays building a new school in China is harder, as it will cost much more money than before," Kimishima said.

Apart from selling crafts and secondhand items, Friend also raises money organizing classes, such as cooking and gymnastics for its members. "A participant needs to pay 50 to 150 yuan for each class," Kimishima said.

The group donates all of the class fees to charity.

As a foreign charitable group in China, Friend gives its money to local nonprofit organizations such as Shanghai Youth Development Foundation (SYDF), as its members believe that these organizations have a better idea about who needs help in the country. "Each time the foundation reports to us how the money was used," Kimishima said.

As a fluent Chinese speaker, it's Kimishima's job to coordinate with SYDF, as well as other charitable organizations and the local government. In her eyes, doing charity work in Shanghai is not difficult for an expat, though there can be problems at times.

In 2012, Friend had to cancel a large charity sale in the Gubei area of Changning district after the local police approached her the day before the event and asked her to call it off, Kimishima said, because of strained relations between China and Japan.

The group ended up canceling the sale for safety reasons.

Nowadays, most of Friend's charity events are held with the help of the Caihongzhiqiao Volunteer Service Center (CVSC), a nonprofit organization that helps volunteer groups in the Hongqiao Road subdistrict of Changning district. The CVSC is overseen by the local chapter for the China Communist Youth League. In Shanghai, volunteer service groups like this have been created in almost every subdistrict.

"Sometimes even locals find it difficult to communicate with the city's government departments, let alone foreigners," said Lu Yao, director of CVSC. "What we do is help them talk to these departments before their activities."

Friend founder Kaoru Shinji sews a storage bag Wednesday.

 

Japanese volunteers for Friend get together every Wednesday to make handmade crafts that they sell to raise funds for the organization.

Photos: Huang Lanlan/GT

Students at a school in Anhui Province show off the sports equipment that the charitable group Friend bought for them in March.

 

Friend members and students pose for a photo at an inauguration ceremony in 2007 for a Hope School in Gansu Province that the organization helped build.

Photos: Courtesy of Friend