Japan seeks student volunteers for 2020 Olympics

TOKYO >> The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games will work with universities across the nation to recruit tens of thousands of students to serve as volunteers at the 2020 games.

Volunteers will constitute the major source of manpower at the games. The organizing committee will ask the universities to award academic credits for participation in volunteer activities, and is considering assigning students to tasks related to their fields of study.

Volunteers are essential components of the manpower required to manage the Olympics. Starting next summer, the organizing committee and the Tokyo metropolitan government will begin recruiting 90,000 volunteers from young people to seniors.

Partly because the Olympic and Paralympic events will coincide with universities’ summer holidays, the committee and the metropolitan government aim to populate the ranks of volunteers largely with students.

The organizing committee has signed cooperation agreements with 795 universities across the nation. A source close to the organizing committee said joining the volunteers “could be a treasured life experience, and the students will be able to use it as a selling point when job-hunting or at other appropriate times.”

For example, students at medical schools and schools of nursing would be assistants for doctors treating emergency patients, and students at sports-related schools would help conduct competitions.

Students at foreign-language schools could interact with spectators from overseas; engineering school students would provide technical assistance; and students at welfare schools could help handicapped people.