Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2011

Living in a major metropolitan city and in a country with socialized medicine, we don’t have to worry about getting access to most medical care we need.

Unfortunately, there are places where that is not the case. Whether through poverty or isolation, there are communities that find themselves without necessary medical services, not just in the developing world, but here in Japan as well.
Japan Heart, a Tokyo-based NGO, is a volunteer organization dedicated to getting medical care to those places. The organization was founded by pediatric surgeon Hideto Yoshioka after a life-changing trip to Myanmar in 1995, where he became concerned about the poor state of affairs in the medical field. Motivated by a desire to raise the level of service available, he has been working in the country for almost ten years in total, an experience he describes as character building, and emotionally and mentally fulfilling.

Yoshioka set up Japan Heart in 2004 to attract other medical professionals who were similarly interested in volunteering. From Myanmar, their activities spread to Cambodia, and the scope of their activities expanded as well. Over the years, they have dispatched hundreds of doctors, nurses, and laypeople from Japan to the two countries, where they provide not only medical services, but also human resource development, healthcare rooms at elementary and junior high schools, orphanages for kids who lost their parents due to natural disasters and diseases such as HIV, assistance to the visually impaired to lead more independent lives, and more.

While the volunteers are unpaid, the real reward is in growth and experience, says one of their staff nurses. “A lot of skills and knowledge are fostered by being in a medical environment entirely different from Japan’s. You’re confronted with your conception of yourself and Japan as a country, make a lot of new discoveries and meet new people. I think it’s a way of growing not just as a medical professional, but as a person.”

It is not only medical professionals who can volunteer. As representative Suma Ito explains, “As a staff member or volunteer you can do the same things you do every day in Japan, like making food, cleaning the house or hospital, carrying packages, playing with the children. The staff are extremely busy, so are enormously grateful for that kind of assistance.”

Japan Heart is also active at home. In addition to volunteer nurses who travel to remote islands and isolated areas with shortages of medical staff, the organization has been providing emergency medical services for seven evacuee shelters following the Tohoku earthquake.

“Currently, with the reduction in the number of shelters operating, we are moving to the second stage: caring for the hearts of the children on whose shoulders the burden of rebuilding lies,” says Ito. “With the purpose of protecting affected children from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], we are providing counseling as well as seminars for adults, such as guardians and kindergarten teachers.”

Japan Heart has also started the Smile Smile Project, which provides travel assistance to children with terminal diseases. Often, the families want to make some last happy memories together, but are concerned about the difficulties and dangers of traveling with a sick child. Japan Heart’s network of volunteers help them realize those plans.

Though the range of their activities seems at first to be broad, Japan Heart sees them all as bound by the same drive: to reach the hard-to-reach, whether it’s a remote village or the heart of a suffering child.

For more information, see www.japanheart.org.