PROMOTING INDEPENDENCE: Firm strives toexport business model to help disabled people
By HIDEO SATO/ Staff Writer
March 4, 2017 at 07:20 JST

Editor's note: This is the final of a three­partseries on the integration of business and socialwelfare.
For care-takers of elderly people, Oral Peacehas been a godsend because even toothpaste
can be a health hazard.

Dentist Emi Sumida, right, instructs a woman on
how to brush teeth with Oral Peace. (Hideo Sato)

But the teeth-brushing gel, which is safe toswallow and has created jobs for disabledpeople, has hit some roadblocks in Trife Inc.’s
attempt to expand the business.
Still, the company continues with its efforts toturn a profit and is eyeing new markets. It
hopes word spreads about its work to help
disabled people improve their lives.

A woman in her 70s who takes care of her husband with dementia at their home in Tokyo was told
about Oral Peace by Emi Sumida, 45, a dentist.
The woman has been using the gel for about three years, secure in the knowledge that no harm will
come to her husband if he swallows it.
The husband is bedridden and obtains nutrition through a feeding tube. Although he does not eat
anything, he must still keep his mouth clean to prevent bacteria from growing and causing
pneumonia.
Twice a day, the wife puts Oral Peace on a sponge brush to clean her husband’s teeth. She also uses
the spray type several times a day.
Ordinary toothpaste poses a major burden on care-givers because elderly people need to spit it out.
Before discovering Oral Peace, the woman had to take her husband to the dentist to check forcavities.
“Brushing his teeth has become much easier,” she said.
Trife has commissioned the 70 or so disabled workers at the Colony Higashi-Murayama facility inwestern Tokyo to handle shipping of the Oral Peace gel around Japan.
In the last fiscal year, Oral Peace-related sales at Colony Higashi-Murayama exceeded 10 million
yen ($88,000), more than double the figure for the previous year. The facility, which helpsdisabled people, has annual sales of about 600 million yen. So Oral Peace has become an
important component.
“There are major benefits from being able to stably handle a product that is marketable,” said
Takashi Sakamoto, 45, the deputy head of the facility.
Other facilities face problems developing new sales avenues for Oral Peace and turning overbenefits in the form of higher wages for their disabled workers.
The Shirane facility in Yokohama’s Asahi Ward employs about 40 disabled workers who are
involved in dismantling water supply meters or cleaning parks. It has also been selling Oral Peacefor four years.
However, the facility currently makes a profit of only about 120,000 yen from the gel a year.
“While it would be really helpful if we obtained a continual stream of orders from senior citizens’
homes, it is not always easy to persuade such facilities to change from products they have used fora long time,” said Tatsuji Nehashi, the 46-year-old facility head, touching upon the difficulty ofexpanding sales.
Many facilities handling sales of Oral Peace, such as Shirane, are categorized as Type B under thelaw on comprehensive support measures for disabled people.
Type B facilities, which employ people who have greater difficulties holding a job, need to only pay
their workers a minimum of 3,000 yen a month.
According to the welfare ministry, about 9,000 Type B facilities around Japan employ a total of
about 200,000 disabled people.
Their average monthly wage for fiscal 2014 was 14,838 yen, or around 187 yen an hour, less than
one-fourth the national average minimum wage.
Toshimichi Takemura, 52, who works in the Social Innovation Program Division at the Nippon
Foundation and has been involved in a project to triple the pay at Type B facilities in TottoriPrefecture, explained why the wages remain so low.
“In addition to some facilities that take the easy attitude of being satisfied with just providing aplace of work, there are problems with the overall framework because the central government
continues to reward facilities with subsidies even if they make insufficient business efforts,”
Takemura said.
Daisuke Teshima, the president of Trife, said, “The only thing we can do is to persistently makeefforts to expand support for our product.”
Teshima has set his eyes abroad.
He plans to start sales of Oral Peace in Dalian, China, as early as this spring, and he is also seeking
to move into Europe by the end of this year.
Teshima eventually wants to export his business model of having disabled people sell Oral Peace
teeth-brushing gel.
He feels that Oral Peace could take off even further in Japan if overseas praise is “re-imported”
into the nation.

Copyright © The Asahi Shimbun Company. All rights reserved. No reproduction or republication without written permission.