Osamu Nakano is the Secretary General of the Japan Workers’ Cooperative Union (JWCU) since July 2024. He joined JWCU in 2014 and has served as a board member and Director of International Relations since 2017. He is also a researcher at the Japan Co-operative Alliance, the apex body of co-ops in Japan, and was a visiting researcher at Tokyo University from 2019 to 2021.
Osamu is the Chairperson of CICOPA Asia and Pacific, and Vice President of CICOPA, the global federation of industrial and service cooperatives. He has represented the Japanese cooperative movement at numerous international forums, including events by the UN, ILO, ICA, and CICOPA. He has published extensively on cooperative movements and the social and solidarity economy. His recent work includes a chapter titled “Platform Cooperatives: Toward the Citizen-Centered Digital Platform Economy” in Decoding Platform Capitalism (Nakanishiya Shuppan, 2023).