Helping College in Philippines Gives Young People a ‘Feeling of Humanity’ : Japanese Overseas Volunteers Offer Peace Corps-Style Contribution

Takayuki Matsumoto, 25, an expert in the artificial insemination of cattle, said he came to the Philippines because “Japan was boring.”

Like many of his colleagues who joined the Japan Overseas Volunteer Corps, he “wanted to get out,” he told an interviewer.

Takayuki Mizuno, 22, said he did not like the strictures of life in Japan, where “you’re put inside a framework. . . . To work with your own ideas, to look at others’ situations and try to do something--I thought the opportunity lay overseas.”

Left a Job at Home

“Japan is just an economic animal,” complained Hidekazu Hayashi, 28, who gave up a job as a machinist after 10 years to become a volunteer with Mizuno at the Central Luzon Polytechnic College. “I didn’t feel any humanity . . . just working for the sake of company profits.”

Hironobu Komatsu, 28, who is also teaching at the college as an automotive engineer, said: “I just got tired of my job (in an automotive shop). I would have liked to go overseas even without joining the Volunteer Corps.”

All four came to the Philippines planning to make a sacrifice for others, a contribution to what their forebears might have called “nation-building.” Many American Peace Corps volunteers have built a career on their foreign experience, but the four young Japanese said they recognize the virtual certainty of never obtaining a position in mainstream society.

“There’s a feeling in Japan that you can have an adventure only when you’re young,” Mizuno said. After marriage or when you enter a company, he said, “freedom is restricted.”

All came to the Philippines thinking they were making a financial sacrifice, only to discover that their pay, $300 a month, which would hardly keep them in food at home, puts them in a class far above their peers.

“It’s embarrassing,” Mizuno said.

Doesn’t Tell All

He tells his counterpart professor at the polytechnic college, a Filipino, that he is paid only $150 a month, because that is what the professor makes.

Matsumoto said he is paid three times what the other researchers make at the Carabao Research and Development Center in nearby Carranglan, which was built with American aid funds. He said that his living expenses amount to only $100 a month and that he donates the rest to charity.

None of the four mentioned the money the Japanese government deposits every month in their bank accounts in Japan. After two years of overseas service, the deposits amount to 2.5 million yen ($17,630). This is paid to them when they leave the service, and for a young man in his 20s it is an impressive sum even by Japanese standards.

Although Matsumoto’s two-year tour ended in December, he extended for another year in order to complete the training of two Filipino laboratory specialists who will take over his job in preparing the semen of carabao, or water buffalo, for artificial insemination.

The Volunteer Corps has sent 1,849 youths to 38 countries around the globe. Last year more than 6,600 youths applied to join the corps, even though it gets almost no attention from the Japanese news media, according to officials at corps headquarters in Tokyo.

In Another Language

The four volunteers said that in order to qualify, they were tested only in English but that have since learned to speak Tagalog, one of the native languages of the Philippines.

“Farmers don’t speak English at all,” Matsumoto said.

He said his work promises to bring real benefits to the farmers, whose carabao suffer from lack of proper nourishment and years of inbreeding. The research center where he works imports semen from India and Pakistan to produce healthier animals. Artificial insemination, he said, can produce a calf every year instead of once every four years, as at present.

Komatsu, on the other hand, thinks his work in teaching Filipinos motorcycle repair is useless.

“After the students are graduated,” he said, “there will be no place for them to get a job. Motorcycle owners in the Philippines all do their own repairs.”

The college started the course, he said, only because it wanted the machinery that the Japanese government was willing to provide because a Volunteer Corps member was to be assigned to teach the course.

All four said they were disillusioned with the Philippines, apparently without consciously recognizing that behind their frustration was the absence of the rigid standards they had left home to escape.

Hayashi said he was disappointed with the Filipinos’ lack of desire to learn and discouraged that so many Filipinos are eager to leave their country. “Those with talent and ability go overseas, making economic development in the Philippines difficult,” he said.

Regional linguistic differences stand in the way of Philippine unity, he said, adding that “this country is not yet a nation.”

Mizuno said that Filipinos “are very kind” but “just too irresponsible.” He said they lack diligence and “won’t finish work on time and never keep promises.”

All four seemed to be complaining that Filipinos do not share Japan’s values. Matsumoto made the comparison directly.

“To Japanese,” he said, “the job comes first, the family second. To Filipinos, the family comes first and the job fifth or sixth.”

Still, all four said they were glad they had come. “I’ve come to see Japan more clearly,” Mizuno said. “I’ve also learned how much (spiritual) strength is needed to work overseas, which I want to do in the future.”

Hayashi said he had come to realize that “Japan is not the only country in the world.” Komatsu, meanwhile, said he had come to understand that Japanese have “many strange traits . . . (and) should be more easygoing.” He said the Filipinos “are good people . . . good to have fun with, but when it comes to work. . . . “ His voice trailed off.

Critical of Homeland

Despite their frustration here, all four remain critical of Japan and even cynical about its aid to the Philippines. Too much of Japan’s aid, they said, never gets to the average Filipino.

Mizuno, who is teaching civil engineering, cited agricultural engineering, his major in college, as a field in which Japanese volunteers could bring benefits directly to the Philippine people. Farmers, for example, suffer from floods in the rainy season but depend on pools of water in the dry season. The problem could be solved by wells or irrigation, he said.

Matsumoto said Japan goes about aiding the Philippines in the wrong way, giving “just money and machinery,” as the Philippines requested.

But because of Japan’s World War II image, he said, Japan “probably finds it hard to turn down any request.”

And he added: “The government thinks that just raising the amount of aid is good. With the high yen and the low dollar, Japanese leaders have come to think that a country as rich as ours can’t resist raising aid, even without U.S. pressure.”