NICE organizes for people from around the globe to work and live together in cooperative voluntary service work camps in Japan and Malaysia, where participants work directly with local communities for two to three weeks on various projects aimed at engaging communities and developing more sustainable practices.  Visit site

Japan is gaining friends in Kenya with the help of shiatsu classes for the blind given by Japanese volunteers. Nearly 900 volunteers from the  Japanese International Co-operation Agency is working in Africa, helping to improve lives of local people.   Visit site

Hands On Tokyo started in December 2006 with a small group of people talking about how they may best to serve their community.  This group however, had a bit of a different make-up.  It was made up of foreign and Japanese nationals interested in developing a bilingual volunteer clearinghouse so that they could volunteer together without the fear of not being able to communicate with each other. (In Japanese and English).  Visit site

In the Philippines, two Japanese volunteers help send young Ifugao people to school and, in the process, learn to cook rice without a rice cooker...

Jephonie Himmiwat is an Ifugao, one of the indigenous people in the northern Philippines. Her people and their land are inseparable, thus both are called by the same name, Ifugao. 

In Japan, two women enjoyed a very different upbringing. Twenty-three-year-old Kiyoko Okamoto spent four years as staff at the Mister Donut chain while she was studying international economics in the city of Fukuoka. Thirty-year-old Kozue Kamijo worked part-time in a restaurant while attending a business school in the Japanese capital.

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