SAPPORO, Feb 22 (Kyodo/APP): A unique internship program in Hokkaido, under which Japanese university students work and live for a month at the famed Niseko ski resort area where English is widely used, has been providing “domestic study abroad” opportunities to participants while helping solve local labor shortage for a decade.
About 430 people have participated in the program since it was launched by the Hokkaido government in 2017, with some eventually relocating to the area or even landing full-time jobs at the company they interned for.
A Hokkaido official said the program, utilizing the area’s characteristics, has helped boost its community population, including non-resident stakeholders.
On Feb. 2, the first day of this year’s program, 16 university students who gathered in the town of Kutchan in the Niseko region, a ski resort area globally famed for its powder snow and which bustles with inbound tourists, wrote down their respective goals on paper.
“To interact with people from diverse cultural backgrounds and acquire new perspectives and English skills,” one wrote, while another vowed “to think and act independently without being afraid of making mistakes.”
Participants this season are working at 10 companies in the resort area, such as a hotel that uses English as its official language and a restaurant popular among foreign tourists.
“At university, opportunities to be exposed to natural English are limited. I want to interact with roommates from different cultures without being shy,” said Koyo Toita, a sophomore who joined from Saitama Prefecture near Tokyo.
The internship program, held every summer and winter, has drawn many participants from outside Hokkaido, including from Gunma Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, and Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, the Hokkaido government’s Shiribeshi bureau said.
Participants often include students who want to study abroad but feel unsure about their language skills or are worried about the high cost of overseas study.
Meanwhile, local companies facing labor shortages have welcomed the program, saying it could lead to future employment. The region’s effective job-offers-to-applicants ratio stood at 2.13 last December, more than twice the average of Hokkaido.
In the Niseko area, there is a shortage of workers particularly in waiting and customer service.
A survey of past participants conducted by the bureau late last year for the first time found that 20 percent of the respondents had moved to live in the region, with some hired as regular employees by the companies involved. Furthermore, 90 percent of the companies said they hope to continue the program.
Keisuke Kurasaka, chief of the regional policy division at the bureau, said it hopes to ride on the momentum to promote other areas in the region in addition to Niseko.