An Invitation to Our Guests
The English Volunteer Guide Program
We Are Looking for Guests Who Would Be Willing
On our tour pages you may have noticed a brief mention of local student volunteers. This page explains what we are asking, and why we are asking it.
Put simply: we are looking for a small number of guests each year who would be willing to let a local student join part of their day and try, in English, to guide them. This is not something we build into our tours. It happens only when a student has prepared and feels ready — and only when a guest has offered first.
For the children we work with, an opportunity like this is extraordinarily hard to come by. There is no shortage of willing students. There is a shortage of people to welcome them.
What It Would Look Like
Should you offer, and should a student be ready on your date, they would meet you at one of your stops — a garden, a viewpoint, a quiet shrine — for perhaps twenty or thirty minutes. They would explain the one thing they had prepared, then walk beside you for a while.
They may ask where you are from, or what surprised you about Japan. Some speak confidently. Some manage only a few careful sentences they have practised for a week. Nothing is scripted, and nothing is staged for effect.
Your professional guide remains with you throughout, so the depth and pace of your tour never change. The student joins the conversation; they do not replace it. All that is asked of you is ordinary kindness.
The Reason Behind the Program
It is a fair question why a private tour company would ask this of its guests. The answer begins with a side of Japan that visitors rarely see.
Japan is admired for the discipline of its schools. Less visible is what happens to the children for whom that system stops working — and the official statistics hide most of them. A child is counted as futoko, a school non-attender, only by counting days of absence. A student who spends the entire year alone in the nurse’s room, never entering a classroom, is formally recorded as present. So is a child who sits at their desk each day wishing they were anywhere else.
When children themselves were asked, the true scale emerged: in a class of thirty-five, three or four are not really there.
10%
of junior high school students — around 330,000 children — attend school in name only: in the nurse’s room, in a separate room, or present in body alone. Almost none of them appear in official statistics.
353,970
Elementary and junior high school students formally recorded as futoko in 2024 — a record high, rising for the twelfth consecutive year. This is only the portion that absence records can see.
8.8%
of children in mainstream classrooms face learning or behavioural difficulties linked to developmental differences — a major reason why school stops working for them in the first place.
Sources: The Nippon Foundation, Survey on Children with a Tendency Toward School Non-Attendance (2018), based on responses from 6,450 students aged 12–15. Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), 2024 national survey on student guidance issues; 2022 survey on students requiring special educational support.
Confidence Is Built, Not Taught
For more than ten years, Step, Inc. has worked with children in Kagoshima who have stopped attending school or who learn differently. Study support alone was never enough. What these children needed most was a moment in which they were genuinely useful to someone.
Self-esteem cannot be handed to a child through encouragement. It is built from evidence — from real moments in which they did something difficult and it worked. A child who has been told, in a hundred small ways, that they cannot keep up discovers in a single afternoon that a visitor from the other side of the world understood them perfectly.
Our education service, Step Kagoshima, has supported children facing school non-attendance and developmental differences since 2008. This program is where our two worlds meet — and it is only possible because guests like you are willing to say yes.
Read Our StoryBefore You Decide
Your tour quality is unchanged
Your professional guide stays with you all day. This is a short addition to your itinerary, never a substitute for any part of it.
There is no extra cost
Nothing is charged, and nothing is expected from you in return. What you would be giving is not money but an opportunity — the one thing these children cannot obtain for themselves.
It happens rarely
Even when a guest offers, a student may not be ready. We would far rather tell you that no one is available than push a child forward before they are prepared.
There is no expectation
Almost all of our guests travel with their guide alone, and that is entirely normal. Saying nothing is a perfectly good answer, and we will never raise it again.