On Saturday, September 24, 2016, we held a training session for hospitality volunteers to help foreigners (*1) at Learning Commons SPACe on the second floor of Global Square.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has launched various efforts to create environments where overseas tourists visiting Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games will feel comfortable traveling and staying in the city. Soka University started this training session for volunteers as a joint effort with the Metropolitan Government so that Soka students will have opportunities to become active volunteers.
The training session was designed to help students acquire basic knowledge about communication with foreign visitors as well as the spirit of hospitality. The participants mostly worked in groups to learn about how they should interact with people who do not speak Japanese, how to solve problems that may arise in the interactions, and what a volunteer spirit is about through various examples.
After the session, the 28 students each received a badge and a certificate of registration as a hospitality volunteer to help foreigners.

*1: Hospitality volunteers are trained to help foreigners who seem lost in public places by speaking simple phrases and sentences in a foreign language. These volunteers are expected to act any time in their day-to-day lives, rather than during only a specific period in specific places such as the Olympic Games.