A number of generous people have emailed me off-list about serving as volunteers or as bilingual interpreters, asking where the need is greatest. Short answer is that the need is everywhere. (In an earlier email to this list, I sketched out some of the options available to serve.) The question is: where will you be best used?

There are many very good NPOs doing good work. Most of my own direct experience is with Peace Boat, one of the largest and most active NPO up there now, and all run by Japanese. As a result, they have very real needs in accommodating the many walk-on volunteers who do not speak Japanese. About 10% o their volunteers are non-Japanese! (Some other large, active NPOs are "international" and based abroad--another story in itself--and run by foreigners; others, like Red Cross, often bring their own specially trained volunteers. In either of these cases, their need is not so great for bilingual interpreters.)

Peace Boat needs to have a bilingual interpreters for each small work group of non-Japanese speakers to insure good communication with the administration, but also to talk to the people whose houses you will be cleaning. You can bring your own group, and work together, which is fun, or you can meet new people in a new group. If you are bilingual and you bring this to their attention, they will often find some others who need your services. So, the more bilingual interpreters they have, the more non-Japanese speakers they can accommodate. (Sometimes they have to turn away foreigners due to lack of interpreters but not often these days.)

If you can serve this role, please contact Yuki Naito, who is now in charge for international volunteers (relief@peaceboat.gr.jp) with your skills and dates. If she does not reply right away, write again--she is very busy. If you still get no reply, email me. You can find a template for the necessary information linked to this page, under "how to apply":
http://peaceboat.jp/relief/.

Of course, even if you do not want to be a interpreter, Peach Boat would love to have you--just email

Please be short and to the point in your emails to her as Yuki is doing a lot.

Please note that neither very formal nor technical Japanese is required: no one is going to let us run heavy machinery (thank god). But it does require a level of communicative ability and precision that would enable you to transmit safety instructions.

Thanks for the chance to clarify.

David Slater
Sophia U.

--
David H. Slater, Ph.D.
Faculty of Liberal Arts
Sophia University, Tokyo