Strengths and Weaknesses of the State-Managed International Voluntary Services: A Perspective from JOCV

Abstract

This study addresses the strengths and weaknesses of state-managed international voluntary services (SMIVS) by examining the case of the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV). It argues that the weaknesses that JOCV suffers from are three-fold: state management and sponsorship, incoherent and multiple purposes of the program, and weak expertise of volunteers. The study demonstrates that these weaknesses have a historical origin in the foundation of JOCV. However, they do not represent problems or tensions to be resolved, nor weaknesses in the program, but rather they are sources of strengths, thereby contributing to the better performance of the JOCV program and the development of local communities. Some implications for other SMIVS programs are drawn.

1 Introduction

While it is widely considered that international volunteering is an activity that is appropriately located within civil society, the state (governments) has managed quite a few international voluntary services (IVS). Actually, many volunteers have been sent to developing countries by state-managed international voluntary services (SMIVS) initiatives, such as the U.S. Peace Corps (USPC), FK Norway (currently Norec), and Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV) from the 1960s, and KOICA Volunteers (currently WFK), Friends from Thailand (FFT), and China’s Overseas Youth Volunteer Program (OYVP) from the 1990s and 2000s.

SMIVS has been subject to three-fold weaknesses in social legitimacy since their genesis. First, the legitimacy of such organizations is weak, because they are managed and sponsored by the state. As volunteering is generally defined as free will activities undertaken for the public good and not motivated by monetary reward, the socially desirable legitimate organizations for IVS are non-governmental (NGOs) or civil society based organizations (CSOs), not the state.¹ Even if many NGOs and CSOs depend on funding by the state, they desire to maintain their legitimacy as volunteering organizations by managing the IVS. In the case of SMIVS, however, this management role is the state’s business.

Second, the legitimacy of purpose is weak. It is generally believed that legitimate IVS should send volunteers for downstream impacts (contribution to development of host communities and partner organizations). Indeed, most SMIVS programs pursue such purposes as fighting against poverty and providing development cooperation and emergency aid. At the same time, many SMIVS programs also aim at upstream impacts (impacts on the domestic society of the sending countries). For example, they pursue volunteers’ learning, fostering their international perspectives, and youth education (FFT, JOCV, WFK), the promotion of friendship (FFT, JOCV, WFK, USPC), the encouragement of people’s exchange (Norec, OYVP), and improving the image of the donor countries (FFT). The pursuit of multiple and incoherent goals, particularly aiming at upstream goals, means that SMIVS is not fully legitimate with respect to their volunteering purpose.

The third weakness is in the legitimacy of expertise. SMIVS sends non-professional development workers, or people who have less knowledge and experience than aid experts, to host countries. It is widely known that the USPC for example has sent many young volunteers who have just graduated from universities to teach English in host countries. Volunteers from JOCV and USPC are young (about 28 on average). Volunteers of FFT and OYVP are also youthful. In a word, SMIVS volunteers are not as professional as technical assistance experts and do not have years of experience behind them.

Despite the tensions and problems represented by these weaknesses, few studies have examined the state management of IVS and the weaknesses that SMIVS has. On the one hand, the literature on SMIVS programs has paid attention to the USPC (e.g., Cobbs 1996; Cobbs Hoffman 1998; Hanchey 2015; Kallman 2020; Magu 2018; Meisler 2011), FK Norway/Norec (Tjønneland 2016), JOCV (Okabe 2016; Okabe et al. 2019; Onuki 2018; Sekine 2016), and KOICA volunteers/WFK (Lee 2018a, 2018b). On the other hand, scholars who are concerned with the relations between the state and nonprofit sector/civil society have shed light on Asian cases. For example, Haddad (2011) and Ogawa (2004) for Japan, Jang (2017) for South Korea, and Hu (2020) for China as a case of an authoritarian state. Nevertheless, both sets of literature did not have the problem of state management within their scope.

Kallman’s work (2020) is noteworthy for its implications for this chapter. Addressing the question of what killed idealism in the USPC and caused the shift from idealism to rationalism (emphasis on procedures and measurement), she notes that institutional pressures of professionalization on the agency and on the volunteers in recruitment, training, fieldwork, and returning home led to the death of idealism in the USPC. The volunteers came under pressure from the USPC agency, the US Congress, the federal government, and neoliberal norms. This argument implies that USPC had institutional weaknesses—vulnerability to the pressures—because of the state management of IVS. The limitation of her book is that while highlighting the problems and tensions caused by this turn toward proceduralism, it paid little attention to the potential advantages or strengths created by state-level management.

This chapter addresses the weaknesses of SMIVS by examining the case of the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (hereafter I refer to JOCVs as volunteers and to the JOCV or JOCV program as a volunteer program). It argues that JOCV has the above-mentioned weaknesses in social legitimacy of organizations, purposes, and expertise. However, these do not represent tensions nor problems to be resolved, but rather they are sources of JOCV’s strengths. This study also demonstrates that the weaknesses have a historical origin in the foundation of JOCV.

The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. The second section identifies the three-fold weaknesses of JOCV, and the third section explores how these weaknesses were created in the history of JOCV’s foundation. Subsequently, the fourth section shows that they can work as sources of strength for volunteering. Finally, conclusions and implications are drawn.

2 The Three-Fold Weaknesses of JOCV

This section identifies JOCV’s three weaknesses of social legitimacy (state management, incoherent and multiple purposes, and the weak expertise of volunteers), and explains how each of them is a recognized weakness. Before this discussion, however, we need to overview the JOCV program.

JOCV is an international voluntary service that the Japanese government provides each year to developing countries. It is managed by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a governmental agency for development aid, and supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). In JICA the secretariat of JOCV is responsible for the program. Since its foundation in 1965, the program has sent 46,640 young adults (as of March 2023) to help economic and social development in 93 countries around the world.² Volunteers used to be selected from Japanese applicants between the ages of 20 and 39 (Secretariat of JOCV 2015a), but the age limit was raised to 46 in 2018.³ The host countries have included those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with former socialist countries added after the end of the Cold War. The areas of cooperation have covered a diverse range of about 120 sectors, including agriculture, forestry and fisheries, fabrication, repair operations, civil engineering, sanitation, education and culture, and sports, as well as planning and administration (Okabe 2016). The program had three objectives: (i) To cooperate in the economic and social development, as well as the reconstruction of developing countries. (ii) To promote international goodwill and deepen mutual understanding. (iii) To develop volunteers’ international perspectives and give back their experience to the Japanese society (Secretariat of JOCV 2015a).⁴

2.1 State Management and Sponsorship

As pointed out in the introduction, SMIVS is weak at the legitimacy of organization level. This is true of JOCV because it is managed by JICA under the supervision of MOFA. Under this JICA–MOFA regime, “JOCV was embedded in a framework of technical assistance by the Japanese government” (Okabe 2016, 233). In this subsection, we will see how the state of Japan sponsors and manages JOCV and how much of the JOCV program reflects this state involvement.

First, the JOCV program is sponsored by the state. To be exact, it is a type of official development assistance (ODA) that JICA as an aid agency provides among other types technical assistance, loans, grants, and emergency disaster relief. JICA’s budget, which is placed under the jurisdiction of MOFA except for the loan account, is appropriated in the national budget every year.

Second, it is managed by the state agency JICA (Secretariat of JOCV 2015a). The JOCV secretariat is responsible for the program within JICA. Unlike the USPC secretariat, it is not an independent administrative body but only a department of JICA headquarters in Tokyo. For the JOCV secretariat, tasks before volunteers’ departure are particularly important. The pre-departure tasks include recruiting volunteers throughout Japan, assigning them to host countries for a period of two years, and providing training in every aspect of volunteering. After the volunteers’ arrival in host countries, JICA overseas offices are directly responsible for on-site tasks, e.g., supporting volunteers for their safety and security and better performance in activities. Volunteers, on their part, are required to regularly inform the overseas offices of their services and daily life.

What highlights the state involvement most in the management by JICA are the pre-departure training, safety and security management, and expenses for volunteers. The training program, which lasts approximately 70 days, is provided by JICA in cooperation with the Japan Overseas Cooperative Association (JOCA), a JICA affiliated organization of returned volunteers. It includes “lectures on volunteerism, cross-cultural understanding, cooperation methods, health management, safety and security, as well as intensive language training appropriate for each dispatch country” (Secretariat of JOCV 2015a). The training program is prepared to improve volunteers’ motivations, capacity, and understanding about developing countries, thereby being expected to contribute toward enhancing their performance in services (Okabe and Mitsugi 2018).

The management of safety and security also represents state involvement (see also Kawachi’s chapter in this volume). Many SMIVS volunteers have faced insecurity in host countries because of their unique status as temporary foreign government-dispatched volunteers. For example, the offices and volunteers of USPC were attacked by local people due to the anti-US sentiment in Bolivia during the 1960s and 1970s (Kawachi 2018, 2–3). Likewise, JOCV has on occasion been looked upon as an enemy in host countries. In Laos, the Pathet Lao communist government regarded development projects by Japan as being the product of imperialism, to the extent that the JOCV program was asked to leave the country (Secretariat of JOCV 2001, 63–64). JOCVs are “perceived as extensions of their government and its policies and become the target of negative sentiment or more by locals” (Kawachi 2018, 3).

Expenses for JOCVs show the involvement of the state as well. During their mission, JICA pays necessary expenses, which include air tickets, local cost of living, and allowance for expenses when they return to Japan.⁵ The cost of these expenses is covered by the national budget, which is the state sponsorship.

Third, MOFA, the supervisor of JICA, has responsibility for the JOCV program at the ministerial level in the government. While early on high ranking officials of MOFA were appointed to the position of director general of the JOCV secretariat, since 1993 JICA staff members, including former volunteers, have been appointed to that position. MOFA, however, keeps its grip on board members and director generals of JICA headquarters by appointing its senior officials to those positions (currently one board member and one director general are from MOFA). Beyond supervising the JOCV program, MOFA recently re-defined JOCV as an effective diplomatic instrument for soft power and is now actively promoting the program as public diplomacy (MOFA Japan 2011; Okabe 2016). Therefore, the foreign ministry has encouraged and praised their voluntary services and spirit on many occasions. Foreign Ministers and Vice Ministers annually have hosted receptions for JOCVs (and other JICA volunteers),⁶ and ministers frequently visit JOCV sites, taking opportunities to do so during their official visits to developing countries.

Thus, JOCV is managed, sponsored, and supervised by state agencies: JICA and MOFA. While JOCV strongly reflects state involvement, no NGOs or CSOs participate in the management of recruiting, training, dispatching, and supervising volunteers. The state of Japan deeply intervenes in the civil society sphere, to which IVS are essentially supposed to belong. In short, JOCV, a typical SMIVS program, is weak in the legitimacy of organizations.

2.2 Incoherent and Multiple Purposes

The second weakness of JOCV is in the legitimacy of purpose. The program is incoherent in its pursuit of divergent goals: to provide technical assistance, to promote friendship and understanding, and to foster youth development and their contribution to Japanese society. Such a mix of downstream and upstream positions—the first purpose is for development of people in developing countries, while the second and third ones could be thought of as being for sender countries’ benefit including the development of volunteers and public diplomacy—seems to be unacceptable to the relevant stakeholders of voluntary service and development cooperation. Fee, Lough, and Okabe’s chapter in this volume suggests that these dual objectives create tensions for SMIVS, “which may struggle to reconcile downstream development outcomes with the domestic agendas of their government funders.”

The first purpose, development cooperation, is the principal objective of JOCV. JICA places the program institutionally within the official development assistance framework. Paragraph 2, Article 21 of the 1974 JICA Act explicitly stated that the Agency (JICA) should undertake operations (including the JOCV program) “to promote and encourage youth activities overseas with the purpose of cooperating in the economic and social development of the developing countries by working together with the people from local communities.” Subsequently, when the act was revised in 2008, Article 13 (4) of the 2008 JICA Act stated that JICA should undertake the following operations among others:

a. To recruit, select and train individuals interested in citizens’ cooperative activities in integration with the residents of developing regions, and to establish and manage facilities for this training.

This contribution to developing countries through JOCV was consistent with the global trend after the 1950s in international voluntary services by Western countries, which were the traditional and main donors for developing countries (Lopez Franco and Shahrokh 2015). Most known is the USPC, established in 1961, that sent thousands of volunteers every year “to help the countries interested in meeting their need for trained people.”⁷ Prior to this, Australian Volunteers International (AVI), a pioneer of IVS, and Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) had started their services in 1951 and 1958, respectively. Affected by USPC, CUSO International (CUSO) and FK Norway started their services in 1961 and 1963, respectively.

The downstream contribution is the main motivation for many JOCV volunteers. A questionnaire survey on JOCVs (n = 1507) demonstrated that the most selected motives of volunteers for joining the program were “to help others” (40.9% of respondents) and “to help developing countries” (36.4%) (Okabe et al. 2019).⁸

By contrast, the second purpose of the program, the promotion of friendship and mutual understanding, is an upstream purpose in a sense that it contributes to diplomatic benefits. Actually, many SMIVS programs including USPC, WFK, and FFT highlight the promotion of friendship as their mission. For example, USPC’s missions, apart from development benefit, are “to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served” and “to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.”⁹ Recently, fostering the friendship and understanding by volunteers is considered effective public diplomacy (Magu 2018). As discussed in Sect. 6.2.1, Japan’s MOFA is also promoting it actively and praises JOCV as a diplomatic tool.

The third purpose, youth development and returned volunteers’ contribution to Japanese society, is the benefit to the volunteers themselves and the benefit to the sending countries’ domestic society. These have been long regarded as important as developmental purposes. Practically, youth development has been the most meaningful mission of JOCV for some stakeholders. Morihisa Aoki, former director general of the JOCV Secretariat and former Ambassador to Peru, stated “the real value of JOCV is volunteers themselves. Producing those wonderful Japanese is a great contribution to Japan as well as the world” (Aoki 1998, 252–253). In line with this, Yoshioka (1998), a journalist and returned volunteer of JOCV, acknowledged the significance of the JOCV in the sense that it provides Japanese youth the chance to cultivate their mental capacities in host countries.

It is noteworthy that JICA dropped youth education from the JOCV’s official purposes in 2015, concluding that nowadays young Japanese people have many opportunities to visit, stay at, and study in foreign countries at their own expense. Nevertheless, it is still considered as an important purpose of the program because it can meet the increasing demand in Japanese society for fostering “gurobaru jinzai” (globally competent human resources), which JOCV has produced for over 50 years (Okabe and Mitsugi 2018). Furthermore, as of July of 2024, it seems that JICA has not abandoned the purpose of youth development, as its website says, “participating volunteers can … gain valuable experience in terms of international goodwill, mutual understanding and an expansion in their international perspectives” (italics added).¹⁰ Therefore, youth education is still alive in JOCV’s objectives.

Returned volunteers’ contribution to Japanese society was emphasized as a key when the program’s purposes were reviewed in 2015. Their contribution is currently focused on, particularly because they are expected to support the restoration of local communities that suffered from the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. While many returned volunteers headed for disaster-affected areas to help victims in the wake of the unprecedented quake, some of them worked for municipalities in those areas for the post-quake restoration. The total number of these returned volunteers in local municipalities had reached 116 as of 2015 (Secretariat of JOCV 2015b). Additionally, returned volunteers are making contributions to domestic and global citizenship by participating in post-placement NPO/NGO activities and volunteering (see Onuki’s chapter for details).

To sum up, JOCV’s goals are mixing downstream with upstream. The concept of JOCV as such can therefore be characterized as mutual benefit to Japan and host countries.¹¹ This is why JOCV is considered weak in terms of legitimacy of purpose. Curiously, the concept of mutual benefit is common among SMIVS programs—USPC, WFK, FFT, and OYVP—all pursue development assistance as well as youth education, mutual understanding, and improving the nation’s good image. In contrast NGO-managed IVS like Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), Australian Volunteers International (AVI), and CUSO International (CUSO) are almost specialized in development assistance for the goals of poverty reduction and sustainable development. They may set up upstream goals such as international exchange and youth education through short-term programs for students, but downstream development purpose is their central mission.

2.3 Weak Expertise of Volunteers

The last factor is the weak expertise of volunteers. Certainly, not a few JOCVs have skills related to their jobs like mechanics, engineers, nurses,¹² physical therapists, farmers, social workers, sports instructors, science/mathematics teachers,¹³ and Japanese language teachers.¹⁴ Generally speaking, however, they are young at the age of about 28 on average (Okabe et al. 2019), inexperienced, and therefore not as professional as technical assistance experts. The tendency for non-professionalism is evident in the fact that 49.9% of volunteers who were dispatched overseas from 1965 to 2014 had been students, temporary employees, and part-time workers before they joined JOCV.¹⁵ This is also the case with their job classification. As of June 2011, 15.8% of all volunteers in operation (n = 2638) were engaged in community development, 8.9% were primary school teachers, and 6.0% were engaged in youth activities. Totally 30.7% of all respondents represent these job categories, which require relatively little professional knowledge and experience.¹⁶

In this feature of the weak expertise, JOCV resembles USPC, the American SMIVS, which paradoxically uses “young, inexperienced, generalist volunteers to undertake what is described as skilled development work” (Kallman 2020, 232). By contrast, VSO, CUSO, AVI, and UNV send volunteers who have knowledge and several years of job experience. The average age of VSO and UNV volunteers was 41 (in 2008) and 40 (in 2014) respectively, and UNV volunteers generally have 10 years of job experience.¹⁷ These volunteers are considered more professional and mature than JOCVs.

Even if JOCVs can upgrade their skills and learn the theories and good practices of volunteering for development cooperation during their intensive training period, it is not easy for many to obtain work-related outcomes for various reasons: insufficient knowledge and experience, a lack of understanding of and communication with local people, a shortage of resources, and the perception gap of affluence between volunteers and local people (Ban 1978; Sekine 2016).¹⁸

Notwithstanding their non-professionalism, JICA has sent over 45,000 volunteers to developing countries for the primary mission of development assistance. Perhaps for the reason of this non-professionalism, JOCVs may not be expected to achieve the developmental purpose so much. As mentioned in Sect. 6.2.2, even JICA staff do not believe that their volunteers can do it but rather regarded youth development as the real purpose of the JOCV program. Again, JOCV is similar to the USPC in this point (Kallman 2020, 219). The former director general of the JOCV secretariat Aoki admitted that “the program may not have achieved great results in economic and social cooperation for developing countries” (Aoki 1998, 252–253).

From the three-fold weaknesses identified above arise two questions: (i) When and how were the weaknesses created within the operation of JOCV? (ii) Do they represent the tensions and problems to be resolved? and (iii) How do they affect the performance of volunteers? The following two sections address these questions in order.

3 Historical Origins of the Weaknesses

History matters in the creation of the three weaknesses. This section delves into the historical and political process of the foundation of JOCV, highlighting international and domestic levels of analysis as well as structural, agential, and ideational factors.¹⁹

3.1 International Structural Factor

At the international level, Japan’s relationship with the United States, a key ally of Japan during the Cold War, should be examined. This structural factor shaped the political arena where agential and ideational factors worked, thereby motivating the Japanese government to step forward and create JOCV.

In 1960, when Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda took office, he was seriously concerned about restoring confidence from the US government that had been undermined by the domestic violent protests against the revision of the Japan–US Security Treaty. During his visit to Washington, D.C. in 1961, Ikeda met President John F. Kennedy and his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, founding director of the Peace Corps, and emphasized Japan’s active diplomacy within Asia. Specifically, Ikeda expressed his hope for economic cooperation, including support of the Peace Corps, within Southeast Asia in order to restore the confidence of the Western bloc countries in Japan. While Ikeda was willing to cooperate with the Peace Corps, however, he had no idea that his government should start a similar project.

Meanwhile, the US government began to encourage similar projects to the Peace Corps in other countries, including Japan. Their intention was to build up middle-level manpower or skilled labor in developing countries. Toward that end, the United States held the International Conference on Middle-Level Manpower in Puerto Rico in October 1962 (Godwin et al. 1963, xv–xvi). Despite earnest requests from the US to promote overseas volunteering, Japan’s response was not positive. MOFA made the decision to send 14 junior experts, rather than volunteers, to five Asian countries including Cambodia and Thailand (JICA 1985, 41; Godwin et al. 1963, 125–26). MOFA argued that the government should send junior experts and provide monetary rewards, claiming that young Japanese people could not afford to provide complete voluntary service as the US Peace Corps did (Suetsugu 1988, 260).

In summary, the US–Japan relationship motivated the Japanese government to approach JOCV as a voluntary service project. Nonetheless, this alone cannot explain why JOCV was characterized as both a voluntary service and a youth development project. The next subsection will examine the domestic social factors.

3.2 Domestic Structural Factor

At the domestic structural level, this discussion needs to explore youth problems in rural and urban areas of Japan prior to the launch of JOCV. Its focus is on how youth associations and LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) members found solutions to those problems in the idea of international volunteering.

In the 1950s, unemployment among second and third sons of farmers was a serious social problem in the rural areas of Japan, where traditional primogeniture still dominated. To deal with this issue, the government set up various youth corps for rural development, of which the most important was the Industrial Development Youth Corps (IDYC) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Construction. However, in the second half of the 1950s, as the Japanese economy grew rapidly and unemployment in rural areas simultaneously fell, these youth corps began to lose their purpose. As a result, they and their related ministries sought to redefine their mission from rural development toward overseas technical assistance as well as the prevention of the communization of rural young people. An example of their new mission was the “Japan Peace Corps,” which was planned in 1962 by the Japan Industrial Development Youth Association (JIDYA), the peak association of regional IDYCs organized in 1953. This suggests that JOCV has its origins in the initiatives of the earlier youth corps and associations.

Youth problems were not unique to rural areas though. Along with the decline in rural unemployment, youth problems in urban areas received more attention. Since 1960, there had been increasing concerns about the anti-security treaty student movement, terrorist acts carried out by young right-wing men such as the assassination of the president of the first opposition party (Social Democratic Party of Japan), and a rise in youth crime. These issues were often discussed in the Diet in the early 1960s, with Prime Minister Ikeda also increasingly absorbed by them. It is likely that politicians’ serious concerns about urban youth impacted the foundation of JOCV. In the wake of the 1960 Security Treaty conflict, the LDP government had more misgivings about young people, to such an extent that some LDP politicians who feared the growing danger of the situation found hope in Kennedy’s Peace Corps and its approach to educating youth.

3.3 Domestic Agential and Ideational Factors

This subsection examines how the domestic issues were linked to the idea of IVS and discusses the roles played by youth associations, LDP politicians, and MOFA in creating these links.

First, youth association leaders and young members of the LDP are focused on. As discussed above, the original idea of sending young Japanese volunteers abroad came from youth associations, led by the eminent leaders Ichiro Suetsugu and Yoshiaki Sagae, both known as the founding fathers of JOCV (JICA 1985). These two leaders, with the purpose of youth development and education, approached the project of sending Japanese abroad in the late 1950s. While they had already generated their own ideas, Kennedy’s speech on the Peace Corps in 1960 had a strong impact on their actions. Immediately the young leaders initiated their plans for public policymaking, and Suetsugu went on an overseas tour to investigate potential host countries for Japanese volunteers (JICA 1985, 17).

Second, the impact of Kennedy’s initiative went beyond inspiring youth associations. Young LDP members, represented by later Prime Ministers Noboru Takeshita, Sosuke Uno, and Toshiki Kaifu, also began to discuss the formation of a “Japan Peace Corps” in 1960, exchanging opinions and ideas with the youth associations. The LDP members’ idea was to give youth, full of ambition, the dream of going abroad and developing friendships with foreign countries (JICA 1985, 42). Motivated by the enthusiasm of its young party members and the youth association leaders, the LDP showed a keen interest in establishing an overseas voluntary service in 1963. Eventually the LDP decided to publicly propose the plan for the coming election campaign, which was the critical factor in showing its interest (Suetsugu 1963, 73). After the victory of the LDP, Prime Minister Ikeda expressed this idea in his policy speech in January 1964.

Although the LDP government decided to undertake the project, many problems still remained unsolved. To examine them, the LDP set up a special commission, which formed a joint research group including MOFA, the Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency (OTCA, currently JICA), youth associations, and business associations. This research group dispatched four teams to Asian and African countries, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Nigeria, to conduct research on host countries’ willingness to accept Japanese volunteers and specific fields and conditions for voluntary service.

After the four research teams returned home, three organizations drafted their own plans. First, MOFA presented a draft that focused on the dispatch of young experts rather than volunteers. The draft, defining the project as a kind of technical assistance, proposed that MOFA should supervise the project and OTCA manage the services. In the second draft, youth associations and university professors argued in favor of sending young volunteers rather than experts, who would live with local people and dedicate themselves to volunteering. Characterizing the project as a private activity, the youth associations claimed that a newly formed incorporated foundation should manage the service under the supervision of the government. The third draft was presented by the Ministry of the Prime Minister’s Office, which seemed similar to the second draft plan.

The LDP’s special commission examined these three drafts, fundamentally accepting MOFA’s draft (the first) and offering little opposition to the idea that OTCA should manage voluntary services as a technical assistance project. Although the basic understanding of the commission was that this volunteer project should not only be characterized as technical assistance but also as a new approach to youth problems, MOFA flatly rejected the idea of tackling Japan’s domestic youth problems in the lands of foreign countries and instead argued that the government did not need to create a new entity for this project. In fact, there were no ministries likely to form such a new entity, despite the special commission’s recommendation (MOFA 1964). As a result, the commission had no choice but to approve MOFA’s draft.

But, as the commission persisted in defining the project as an approach to domestic youth problems, it laid down one condition for the agreement: that MOFA agree that the Ministry of the Prime Minister’s Office would set up a consultation body organized by advisors from the public and private sectors and that MOFA respect the opinions of the consultation body with regard to JOCV policies. Finally, MOFA accepted this compromise by the commission and assumed authority over the overseas volunteer project (MOFA 1964).

Thus, the government settled on a plan to send young volunteers, not experts, as a technical assistance project and formulated a policy that MOFA supervise the project and OTCA manage related services. This was the historical origin of the state management and weak expertise of JOCV. And as a result of the political compromise between the LDP, youth associations, and MOFA, two goals were added to the project: promoting friendship and developing the international perspectives of youth. Here we can find the origin of its incoherent and diverse objectives. In short, this was in the historical and political process of the time that the JOCV’s three-fold weaknesses were created.

4 Sources of JOCV’s Strengths

The weaknesses discussed in Sects. 6.2 and 6.3 may seem to be problematic for the JOCV program and the performance of volunteers. However, as this section argues, these weaknesses paradoxically built up sources of strengths, thereby helping volunteers to contribute to development in host communities.

4.1 State Management and Sponsorship: The JICA–MOFA Regime

The first weakness—state management and sponsorship—indicates that JOCV is not legitimate as an IVS organization, because the program is not managed by NGOs but by the state. But as this subsection demonstrates, the management of the service by the state’s organizations does not cause problems, rather it helps to gain better performance from volunteers.

The management of JOCV is a business of the JICA–MOFA regime, under which MOFA supervises the program and JICA recruits volunteers, provides training, dispatches them abroad, and supervises each volunteer’s activity. Although it started as a result of the political compromise that LDP, MOFA, and youth associations reached in 1965 as observed in Sect. 6.3, the regime, once established, continues to support the JOCV program through the following three institutions in a path-dependent way.

First, volunteers enjoy the organizational support offered by JICA headquarters and its overseas offices in developing countries.²⁰ This support includes consulting with national/local governments and local counterparts in host countries about volunteer assignments, providing information about volunteering areas and communities, advising volunteers on their activities and daily life,²¹ and, if necessary, financing the purchase of materials and services (see Yamada’s chapter in this volume for the roles of overseas offices). Importantly, as the chapters of Hosono and Ueda in this volume show, JICA can link volunteers to specific ODA projects. For example, Ueda offers a good example of this linking in her case study on the Chagas disease vector control program in Honduras. Within JICA’s technical assistance for the program, Japanese volunteers worked with local volunteers and contributed to motivating people to fight for the prevention of the parasitic infectious diseases. Such links to ODA projects are unique to JOCV, because this connection is hardly witnessed in other SMIVS programs like USPC and FK Norway/Norec or in NGO-managed IVS like VSO, CUSO, and AVI, all of which are independent of development aid agencies.

Second, the JOCV was embedded in a diplomatic strategy. MOFA, which had initially been negative about IVS by Japanese youth, came to consider JOCV an effective instrument of soft power for public diplomacy as discussed in Sect. 6.2. For this reason, MOFA, as the supervisor of JICA, buttressed the JOCV program in formulating the budget, promoting it as a scheme of technical assistance, and making an agreement with host country governments about the provision of voluntary service. This embeddedness in diplomacy enables JOCV to continue to enjoy support from MOFA.

Third, the JICA–MOFA regime was reinforced by domestic stakeholders such as the LDP, local governments, and the returned volunteers’ association (JOCA). The long-governing LDP supported the budget allocation and sustainability of the program.²² The main supporters in the party were young and powerful politicians who enthusiastically encouraged the launch of the program and later became prime ministers. While JOCA was entrusted with the duties of recruiting, screening, and training volunteers, local governments and public schools helped the recruitment of young adults by recommending that their officials and teachers apply for volunteering.

Thus, thanks to the JICA–MOFA regime in cooperation with related stakeholders, the program and volunteers could rely on personal and institutional support in their activities, thereby obtaining resources such as information, skills, materials, manpower, service, and finance. Volunteers utilized these resources to work with local people and achieve the goals of their voluntary service.

4.2 Incoherent and Multiple Purposes

The second weakness exposes the incoherence of the program’s goals and the odd coexistence of downstream and upstream contributions. This incoherence and multiplicity though met the wide range of young people’s motivations and enhanced the attractiveness of JOCV.

Okabe et al. (2019) conducted a cluster analysis of JOCVs’ motivations for joining the program and categorized them into six types labeled as: (I) curious; (II) business-minded; (III) development assistance; (IV) quest for oneself; (V) change-oriented; and (VI) altruist. The existence of these six types is apparently aligned with the three objectives of the JOCV program. For example, the types (III) and (VI) precisely match the first purpose (technical assistance). Likewise, types (II) and (V) are suitable for the third purpose (youth education). Regarding the second purpose (international friendship and mutual understanding), the most suitable volunteers are the type (I). Overall, the JOCV program’s multiple, though incoherent, purposes were able to meet the various interests of young Japanese people.

Thanks to this attractiveness to youth, the JOCV program has been successful in recruiting many competent and highly motivated volunteers for some 60 years, to the extent that it could achieve positive results for each purpose. With regard to the first purpose, developmental assistance, while many volunteers used to face difficulties, some few volunteers performed well in their activities. For example, they contributed to campaigns for the prevention of infectious diseases like poliomyelitis in Bangladesh and Chagas disease in Honduras by creating and increasing social capital in local communities (Ueda’s chapter in this volume). They also accomplished the purpose by promoting the capacity development of local people and organizations in projects of mathematics education in Central America, New Rice for Africa (NERICA) dissemination, the One Village One Product (OVOP) initiative in Malawi and El Salvador, and others (see Hosono’s chapter in this volume).

Achievement of the second purpose—international friendship and mutual understanding—are evidenced by many episodes. At the national level, a case from Bhutan demonstrates such friendship nicely. JOCVs are well known and admired for their activities in that country to the extent that King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck took basketball lessons from a JOCV coach in his high school days. Subsequently, when the King paid a visit to Japan in 2011, he requested to hold a meeting with former volunteers to express gratitude to them.²³ Also, Sekine (2016) in his anthropological study about JOCVs working in the Pacific Islands discusses how their individual activities promote friendship and understanding between volunteers and local people. He argues that “(e)ven if there are no notable or sustainable work-related results, there are many cases in which the image of the volunteer remains firmly ingrained in the memories of the local people” (20). Such positive memories remain with local people because Japanese volunteers “come to empathize with the lifestyle of the local people and adjust their sense of values to align with the culture” (21).

It should be noted that without this friendship and understanding, it would be impossible for volunteers to achieve the developmental goals.²⁴ A lot of episodes and stories written by volunteers, JICA, and scholars report that volunteers promoted friendship and mutual understanding through their daily life and work with local people and thanks to these they made progress with the jobs.²⁵ In this sense, the first and second purposes are interconnected in the individual volunteers’ mind.

The third purpose—youth education and their contribution to Japanese society—may be expected to be easily achieved through volunteering, though actually it is difficult to observe and evaluate it. Therefore, the heuristic impact of JOCV has attracted scholarly attention.²⁶ As for the JOCV’s impact on intercultural competencies, Onuki (2018) in her statistical analysis demonstrated that after one year of working in host countries JOCVs’ competencies increased, and “in particular, (that of) intercultural negotiation exceeded the level before volunteering.” Sekine (2016) also demonstrated that many volunteers were disappointed with the unanticipated reality in host countries of the Pacific Islands: the socio-cultural conditions that subsistence affluence and the custom of mutual support characterize local societies and therefore people lack ambition for development and continue to wait for foreign aid. Volunteers, however, came to understand their sense of values and even to admire it after a while. Such a process is “relevant to the outcome of achieving personal development, one of JOCV’s main objectives” (Sekine 2016, 18–22).

The returned volunteers’ contribution to Japanese society has been studied less than youth education. Okabe et al. (2019), which categorized JOCVs into six types, demonstrated that many volunteers of the type (III) “development assistance” and (VI) “altruist” wanted to be involved in NPO/NGO activities after returning home. From their statistical study, Onuki’s chapter in this volume shows that returned JOCVs with higher levels of “Openness-to-change” contributed more days of volunteering in the domains of education and international development.

4.3 Weak Expertise of Volunteers

The final weakness is in the expertise of JOCVs—insufficient level of knowledge and experience—in their jobs. This seems to be problematic, since it implies the unsuccessful performance in their technical assistance and makes the program look like voluntourism by university students.²⁷ This assessment may be right, if the weakness (or the strength) is defined as the extent of expertise that is made up of knowledge and experiences. The fact that volunteers are not so strong in expertise as paid development workers or experts implies that they do not have enough capacity to help local people.

Paradoxically, however, it is in this weak expertise that the strength of JOCVs lies. In other words, volunteers can help to empower local people all the more because they know themselves to be weak or amateur in expertise (Shirakawa 2019). Having recognized the weakness, volunteers are motivated to open their windows in two directions: approaching local people inside and outside communities. They have a big advantage over the experts and staff of aid agencies in taking this two-track approach, which helps them to achieve developmental goals. I call this advantage “the strength of weak expertise.”²⁸

First, JOCVs are motivated to approach people inside communities with whom they live and work together: listening humbly to them, respecting their voices, and sharing their perspectives and sense of value (Kawakita 1974; Shirakawa 2019).²⁹ This approach of “community-embeddedness” (see Fee, Lough, and Okabe’s chapter in this volume) is a key to discovering local people’s real needs for economic and social development to an extent that the people can act on their own initiatives. A Japanese anthropologist Jiro Kawakita argued that as it was not easy for outsiders like foreigners to discover people’s real needs and occasionally it could be the case that people themselves did not know them, so dialogues were important. He illustrated the importance of dialogues between outsiders and local people with his experience in a poor village of Nepal in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. While villagers knew the details of their village and neighboring areas and used to think about their development, outsiders like Kawakita had more knowledge of the civilized world outside the village. The villagers and outsiders encountered and expanded the dialogues between them. That led to the discovery of real needs (Kawakita 1974, 213). Kawakita’s argument is true for JOCV. Their approach to people inside communities—listening to them and sharing their views—can be helpful in the expansion of dialogues to discover their real needs.

Second, the recognition of their weakness motivates JOCVs to approach individuals outside communities as well. Volunteers can rely on those people for knowledge and experiences that they and community members lack. The key to this approach is networking and trust building between individuals, through which local communities can obtain resources to exploit for developmental purposes (Lin 2001). These networking and trust building mean that JOCVs have “bridging” and “linking” social capital with outsiders (Szreter and Woolcock 2004). To put it simply, bridging social capital is the horizontal network between people of different groups that are more or less equal in terms of their status and power. Linking social capital, by contrast, is developing vertical networks to connect people across explicit power differentials. Such outsiders can be development experts, staff of aid agencies, other volunteers working a long way off, and local government officers and people of other communities.

The JOCV program institutionally encourages volunteers to try the two-track approach. The 1974 JICA Act, Paragraph 2, Article 21, provides that JICA conduct the program “with the purpose of cooperating in the economic and social development of the developing countries by working together with the people from local communities” (i.e., people inside communities).³⁰ The pre-departure training program also encourages to approach people inside communities. During the training period, volunteers must take a course in the foreign languages spoken in their host countries, including minority languages in terms of the speaker population such as Nepali, Laotian, Swahili, and so on. Developing their language skills is considered necessary for volunteering in local communities. Further they learn about cross-cultural understanding, blending in host communities, and supporting people’s self-help efforts.³¹

For approaching outsiders, JICA overseas offices provide formal and informal opportunities for volunteers to be connected with office staff, experts working for specific ODA projects, and other volunteers working in distant areas. For example, annual meetings of JOCVs, study meetings on voluntary service and ODA projects, and informal gatherings by interested persons are organized by JICA offices as well as by volunteers themselves (Yamada 2018, 164–167). Through these meetings bridging and linking social capital is created between volunteers and outsiders of communities. Again, these kinds of support for volunteers are all available thanks to the first weakness or the state management of JOCV program.

In the field of volunteering, many JOCVs put the strength of weak expertise into practice. Take the examples of two cases: the first is a case of discovering the real needs of local people and bridging social capital. A volunteer (called X as a pseudonym), who worked in Ghana to develop and spread a processed product of oranges utilizing her expertise in food processing.³² Realizing the necessity of grasping the actual condition of farming, X visited farmers in distant areas and this revealed that oranges were overproduced with their wholesale price held down by middlemen. Therefore, X attempted to make jam from oranges to local people’s taste to increase its consumption. Then X gave numerous lectures to farmers to teach them how to produce orange jam, but because it was an unfamiliar food, no farmer really tried jam making as a business. To break this deadlock, the volunteer not only worked on the improvement of jam but also that of sales channels. Although it did not progress easily, X’s subsequent encounter with the owner of a bakery who offered to manage jam finally opened the way for marketing. This led X to hit upon a method to sell orange jam by combining it with the bread that local people ate on a daily basis—jam on bread. Following a good response from consumers, the volunteer organized a group of producers of orange jam in order to realize specific production and sales plans. While the volunteer had no experience of sales, she had skills in food processing. Thus, because of this weakness, she tried to listen humbly to the voices of farmers and consumers and to share local people’s sense of value (taste for food). Moreover, by taking the chance to encounter the bakery owner, she created bridging social capital to connect farmers, producers, and retailers.

The second case shows how a JOCV played a role in linking local people to outsiders who have expertise. The volunteer, who worked for the NERICA rice³³ promotion in the West Region of Cameroon from 2013 to 2015, reported that as she had little knowledge and experience in the rice cultivation, she often asked JICA experts for professional advice and invited them to visit her site in order to connect them with local farmers. That was what she could do. This approach—creating linking social capital—was successful in changing the rice farmers’ behavior. Taking advice from experts and realizing the improvement of yield, they began to cultivate NERICA. In particular, the experts’ site visit and technical advice encouraged them to enjoy the new challenge.³⁴

In summary, JOCVs are motivated by their weakness in expertise to stay together and listen to local people when seeking to discover their real needs. They are also motivated to rely on outsiders, who have resources that otherwise JOCVs and local people lack, for bridging and linking social capital. Counterintuitively, despite their weakness, volunteers have succeeded in their service for development. They transformed weak expertise into productive strength.

5 Conclusion and Implications

This study addressed the weaknesses of SMIVS in the legitimacy of organizations, purposes, and expertise by examining the case of the JOCV program. The first weakness is state management. The JOCV program is managed by JICA under the supervision of MOFA. As volunteering is considered to be an activity of civil society organizations, it seems to be far from desirable IVS. The second one is JOCV’s incoherent and multiple purposes: encompassing development cooperation, international friendship, and youth education together. The program is incoherent in its pursuit of both upstream and downstream goals. Finally, the practical expertise of JOCVs is weak. For the purpose of development cooperation, the Japanese government dispatches many volunteers who have fewer skills, knowledge, and experience than professional experts.

These weaknesses have a historical origin in the foundation of JOCV. When it was established, the Japanese government was motivated by international and domestic factors. While the US. government was encouraging the Japanese government to launch a similar program to their Peace Corps, domestic youth problems in Japan were seriously concerning youth associations and the governing party (LDP), who found solutions to those problems in the idea of the Peace Corps. In the decision-making process, these agencies reached a political compromise with MOFA. The government then settled on a plan to send young volunteers abroad for both development and youth education and formulated a regime that MOFA supervise the program and JICA manage related services.

Despite the three-fold weaknesses, JOCV did not suffer from any problems and tensions related to them. On the contrary, they became sources of its strengths. First, state management enabled all stakeholders to cooperate with each other for the better performance of JOCV. JICA and MOFA were not the sole stakeholders either. The returned volunteers’ association, local governments, and public schools, and the LDP also supported the JOCV program in recruiting, training, and allocating the national budget. Second, the multiple and incoherent purposes of the program made itself more attractive to youth. Japanese volunteers had a mixture of altruistic and egoistic motivations for joining JOCV, therefore the three purposes met the wide range of young people’s interest and increased the number of volunteers. Finally, the weak expertise of volunteers actually demonstrated strength in their activities. JOCVs, motivated by their insufficient knowledge and experiences, attempted to listen humbly to local people and respect their voices in order to grasp the real needs. From the same motive, they also created bridging and linking social capital to connect local people and outsiders who had the necessary knowledge, experiences, and skills.

This chapter has argued that the weaknesses of the JOCV program contributed to its better performance in practice and therefore assisted development in local communities. From this counterintuitive conclusion some implications can be drawn for other SMIVS programs, particularly in East Asia. On the one hand, they have a chance to perform well, because they share the first and second weaknesses with JOCV: cooperation between stakeholders under state management and multiple purposes including technical assistance and youth education. This will be the case with the Korean SMIVS, which is managed by KOICA and supervised by MOFA. On the other hand, whether the third weakness or the weak expertise can turn into strengths in other SMIVS programs depends on contingent factors, including volunteers’ motivations, their personal relationships with local people, and positive attitudes toward sharing perspectives with them. Exploring these factors will be scholars’ future tasks for our better understanding of the work of SMIVS.

Appendices

Appendix Essay 5: A JOCV’s Story in Cameroon: Essence of Volunteering Abroad

Saori Yamamoto

I served as a JOCV community development volunteer in Cameroon from 2013 to 2015. My major was International Relations and Cultural Anthoropology at university, so I had a strong interest in volunteering and being involved in development from the perspective of local people. I was just excited to go to Cameroon as a JOCV.

I was assigned to a small village in the West Province of Cameroon. I was the first foreigner in the village. I started my activity in the village where nobody knew me, and tried to work together with my counterpart and neighbors.

In the beginning, I had problems making appointments with them because they tended to be late for an appointment or not show up for a meeting without notice. I tried to be patient and wait for them to come to the meeting. However, some days it was mentally difficult to wait for two or three hours. From my side, arranging meetings with them sometimes even felt like a waste of time. I had no choice but to walk around the village every day, introducing myself, asking them to teach me their local language, and try to learn about their way of life.

About a month after I arrived in the village, I realized I had a big misunderstanding. It was when I was chatting with a neighbor woman while buying breakfast at a concession stand as usual. She said, “I’m sorry, Saori, but I can’t attend the meeting today because the market is being held today. You go to the market too, don’t you?” From her words, I finally realized that they have a local calendar. Following this calendar shows that the market is held every 8 days and has priority over meetings or any other events in the village. This was a turning point in changing my view of the local people. I finally understood that they were late for a meeting for their own solid reasons.

Invitation letter from a local event organizer (2014). Photo by Saori Yamamoto

Landscape of a village in the Western Cameroon (2015). Photo by Saori Yamamoto

Here is one of the highlights of the relationship-building episode with them. Everyone would stare at me when I walked through the village, and it was very stressful, especially in the beginning when I arrived in the village. I also felt that I wasn’t accepted by my counterpart and neighbors, so they didn’t come to meetings on time or skipped meetings without notice. However, as time went on, I found that my idea was wrong. When there was a festival in the village, I often received an invitation to be a guest. Early on, the invitations were addressed to “JOCV Volunteer.” At the end of my first year of activities, when I received an invitation, it was addressed to “Saori Yamamoto,” instead of “JOCV Volunteer.” I will never forget how happy I was to receive an invitation addressed to me. I showed the envelope to my counterpart and said, “Look! My name is spelled right on the invitation letter! People in the village recognize me now!” His reaction was not what I had expected:

Of course everyone knows your name, your home country, and what your JOCV activities are. We have been living together for a year in this village. I have learned about Japan and working with foreigners from you.

My idea that I would not be accepted into my counterpart and neighbors because they didn’t respect the time of meetings was wrong. I realized how one-sided I was. I had already been accepted by them. Over time, we spent time together, and became interested in each other’s cultures.

When I was at university, I knew how important it was to respect each other’s cultures. However, there was a big difference between knowing and doing. I didn’t really understand the importance and difficulty of understanding other cultures. Seeing is believing, so I should have gone to Cameroon. From my JOCV experience in Cameroon, I learned that there is no perfect way to understand the local culture and that you don’t have to be afraid of misunderstandings to understand the local people. I really enjoyed spending time with my counterpart and neighbors. Merci, mes amis!

Appendix Essay 6: The Long Journey of Development Cooperation Across Four Continents

Yoshikazu Ito

Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers, 1968

When I was working as a civil engineer for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (currently the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries) at the Gunma Water Works (Water Resources Development Corporation), my director asked me to join the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV) managed by OTCA (Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency. Currently JICA), a program that had just been established. I received an invitation to join the JOCV. Thinking that it might be a good idea to work overseas, I went for an interview and was dispatched to the Philippines as a civil engineer in January 1968. I worked for the Philippine government’s PACD (Presidential Arm on Community Development) and was dispatched to the Infanta/Polilio Island area in Central Luzon. This area was the site of a fierce battle at the end of World War II and was significantly underdeveloped. PACD staff accompanied me to the area, but when the locals learned that I was Japanese, they started throwing pebbles and shouting abuse at me.

However, I gradually got used to life in the area. For nearly a year, I worked hard to improve the social infrastructure in the area I was dispatched to. In anticipation of the results, I was then assigned to the PACD headquarters in Manila and dispatched to areas where social infrastructure development had not yet progressed (southern Luzon, Cebu Island, Romblon, Iloilo, Bohol, Mindanao, etc.). I have since been involved in several large-scale social infrastructure planning projects. The old technical books I brought from Japan were very useful for my work in the Philippines. These books are a complete collection of irrigation and farm road planning and accumulation methods written in the early twentieth century and were given to me by a director of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry before I went to the Philippines. In developing countries, traditional methods are often more useful than modern methods. When I was about to return to Japan after 2 years of work, I donated this complete collection to PACD at the request of my counterpart.

United Nations Volunteers (UNV), 1971

Shortly after returning to Japan from the Philippines in January 1970, I attended a seminar on ODA (Official Development Assistance) organized by the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) in Fukuoka as a lecturer, along with the staff of the JOCV Secretariat. The seminar was held at the U.S. Consulate General in Fukuoka, and after the seminar, I received a book from the Consul General as a commemorative gift. Looking back, this book is what started me on a long, long journey of development cooperation across four continents.

The book is The Good War: The U.N.’s World-Wide Fight Against Poverty, Disease and Ignorance (Marian Maury 1965). The book states that the source of a good war is a vast network of labor centered on food, money, and technical assistance from the haves to the have-nots, and that developed and developing countries need to work together. We seek to prosper together. Let’s learn together. If I had not read this book, I might have stayed in Japan and worked as a national civil servant until I retired.

In the fall of 1970, I learned from USAID that the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) was planning to dispatch Japanese volunteers to Yemen. This was before the official launch of the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) Programme. I was busy with work and wasn’t interested, but later I received a letter from USAID saying that there were no applicants for this dispatch program. Yemen is a country well known for its agricultural engineering and is home to the world’s oldest irrigation dam, Marib Dam, built in the eighth century BC. As an irrigation and flood control expert, I was interested in Yemen, so I decided to apply if there were no other applicants. In the spring of 1971, after receiving Arabic language training at UNDP Headquarters (NY), I was sent to Yemen. There were also six other volunteers from Sweden, Italy, Finland, Norway, and Austria (two) who participated. After arriving in Yemen, I was formally appointed to UNV in November of 1971. I was the first Japanese person to join UNV. Later that year UN volunteers from Kenya, Egypt, Iran, and the Philippines came to Yemen.

With an Italian UN volunteer in the field in Yemen (November 1972). Photo by Yoshikazu Ito

As a water resource engineer my job was to work with Yemeni government engineers and an Italian volunteer to ensure quality irrigation and drinking water supplies. I oversaw the desert region facing the Red Sea, investigating the presence of underground water from the mountains through geological and electrical surveys, collecting data, and drilling deep wells for irrigation. Meanwhile, the Italian volunteer was in charge of the mountainous areas. The local people were very happy with the project, which made it very rewarding.

Through this project, we transferred technology through the training of many Yemeni government technical staff and counterparts, and we believe that their skills improved as a result. My Italian volunteer colleague was in charge of the mountainous region and spent days and nights surveying for the construction of reservoirs. We spent a weekend at our accommodation, and the Italian UN volunteer and I collaborated on drawings of the reservoir (we all lived together). Reservoirs and irrigation canals were constructed with the cooperation of the Ministry of Public Works and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, based on drawings with input from other UN volunteers in charge of crop cultivation technology.

Developing agricultural water resources (including drinking water) in the arid region I was in charge of was a major challenge, but once we succeeded in drilling a productive deep well, we received a series of requests from local residents for new drilling. These requests usually came from tribal chiefs (sheikhs), but, in some regions, they had to be turned down for geographical or geophysical reasons.

However, there was still an atmosphere of insistence on drilling (sometimes even at gunpoint!) and we have dug wells even though there was no water source in a particular location. In a local area, the project will not progress unless the wishes of the tribal chief (sheikh) are respected, so I learned the importance of putting into practice the proverb “when in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and listening to the true wishes of the local people. Moreover, I made use of it in my future activities.

Development Cooperation Across Four Continents

Later, I put my experience gained through JOCV and UNV into practicing “The good war” in various countries. In 1975, my achievements in Yemen were recognized and I was dispatched to Ethiopia, Nepal and Bhutan as a UN Water Resources Development Specialist for several years on the recommendation of UNDP and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). I also worked with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan and JICA, serving in countries and regions where conflicts had just ended (NIS countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Angola, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Bolivia, Paraguay, etc.)

Moreover, I was also involved in development assistance projects and vocational training in the Golden Triangle of northern Thailand as part of a drug eradication campaign with JICA and WHO. I have visited and stayed in 25 countries in Africa, 17 countries in Asia and Oceania, 11 countries in Central America/South America, 8 countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, and 9 countries in Europe, working across four continents for development cooperation.

Some people working in the development cooperation sector will be unfamiliar with my working experience in European countries, but I would like to raise one example from Poland where I served in the JICA office in 1993 as the first Chief Representative. Poland has a strong relationship with JOCV. As part of the Japanese government’s policy of support for Eastern Europe, JICA started sending JOCVs for the purpose of cultural exchange. Later, JICA also assisted in the establishment of the International Volunteer Program in Poland.

I would like to highlight that a study delegation from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NGOs, and universities visited Japan and met at the Komagane Training Center of JICA in July 2007. The Polish delegation observed lectures and language training, participated in morning exercises, and exchanged views with the JOCVs and staff of the training center. Thanks to this, Poland is currently implementing a Polish Aid Program (Volunteering), mainly in African countries.

In December 2021, UNV’s 50th anniversary celebration was held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and I was invited by the United Nations to give a keynote speech on UNV support and SDGs at the United Nations Headquarters Convention Hall. Through my support experience across four continents, I have interacted with people from all over the world. Drawing on that experience, and with the spirit of “learning together and thriving together,” I will stay active for the rest of my life and continue to actively engage in the fight against poverty (the good war). If you ask for my involvement, I’ll think about it!

At the UN Headquarters Convention Hall (December 2021). Photo by Yoshikazu Ito