In Japan, there are many problems supporting people with disabilities, as barrier-free and universal design are not common. This is particularly true in the field of education, where people with disabilities are facing accessibility issues that cause them to give up on learning and traveling. For example, many cannot get any support for taking notes in class, moving around the classroom, or doing experiments. This lack of support is also true when taking school trips. As students in the Department of Global Tourism, this last point is of particular importance to us.

You might be wondering what a school trip is. In Japanese high schools and junior high schools, students take trips to various places – including foreign countries – to learn the history and culture of the destination as well as the importance of peace, and so on. For example, if students visit Okinawa for a school trip, they must visit the former site of the Pacific War between Japan and the USA, learn about its history and the horrors of war. And if students visit Kyoto, they must visit some historical places to learn about Japanese tradition, culture, and history. Such school trips are part of the culture of Japanese education.

However, students with disabilities always face some difficulties to participate in these school trips. On the one hand, there are often a lot of physical and design-based barriers in the destination, so it can make it difficult for them to enjoy their school trip. One the other hand, some parents of disabled children don’t let them go on these trips because they don’t think that their children can participate in the trip due to their disabilities. This is a big problem as well. One of the solutions to accessibility issues on school trips is called ‘universal tourism’. This is one of the new forms of tourism that emphasizes the important role tourism can play in creating a sustainable society. Universal tourism is that which everyone can participate in and enjoy, regardless of their age, gender, income, and disabilities. When tourism is more universal and accessible to all, everyone benefits, from the tourists, hosts, and local residents.

One organization that is working to support disabled students, both in and out of the classroom, is called UNI. UNI is a fruit that grew out of the experiences of a young man named Ken Sato, who was a university student with disabilities. When he first enrolled in Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, he was faced with many problems and difficulties that affected his learning. So he decided to set up a student-led organization to provide support to other students with disabilities. After gaining more knowledge and experience, he and his fellow students established UNI as an official NPO in 2011. The meaning UNI is related to the concepts of ‘universal’, ‘university’, ‘unique’, and ‘unity’. Based in Kyoto, a city with a high population of university students, UNI provides support through various human resources, doing everything it can to solve problems that disabled students and their families and teachers have. It provides three kinds of support: learning support, school trip support, and livelihood support.

We thought the support of school trips by UNI was a good activity to contribute to this universal and sustainable tourism. The reason why we chose this NPO as the target of our research and interview is because we thought we could introduce the most important thing to help disabled people and students and the area of tourism. We want readers to know the ways that tourism can contribute to education and an equal society through this investigation. In July of 2022, we got in touch with a representative of UNI, named Mr. Kuboyasu. a former Ritsumeikan University student, Mr. Kuboyasu was one of the founding members of UNI, along with Ken Sato. We sat down with him and asked him some questions about UNI and its work to help students with disabilities in the Kyoto area.

Interview

Interviewees
Mr. Kuboyasu – The non-profit organization UNI

Q: Who are you and what kinds of work do you do in this organization?

Mr. Kuboyasu: First, this organization is not so big. We have four staff and some student supporters. Our work is helping students with disabilities to do what they are willing to, but they have some difficulties due to their disabilities. This is really tough.
Supporting their school trips is one of these tasks. I mainly help with their learning in the university or in other schools.

Q: How was UNI established and what is its main mission?

Mr. Kuboyasu: Yes, well Ritsumeikan University is just near this office, and we started there. Our founder, Ken Sato, who has a disability called muscular dystrophy which makes all of his muscles weak, enrolled in this university in 2003. After enrollment, this disability had gotten so bad that he needed help breathing, and his hands and legs had become paralysed. He could still learn things by himself, but the equipment and support was not enough at that time. For example, he was not able to take notes. That’s why people around him started a movement to help these students and made a student organization. Before our founder and I graduated from university, we set up a student-led organization for supporting disabled students. By the way, did you know there is also the same organization in Kyoto University of Foreign Studies (KUFS)? There is. In this way, there are also some students who have the same difficulties. To change this situation, we set up the NPO around the time when I graduated. We see our main mission as improving the situation where students with disabilities are unable to learn.

Q: Could you tell us about the situation for disabled students in Kyoto?

Mr. Kuboyasu: It has been improved since 20 years ago, but there are still some barriers. For example, what if there is someone who can’t hear or see? If there are no problems doing your project with them, then that’s fine. But, if there are some problems or barriers, those are preventing them from participating in your project. We are trying to break down these barriers. There are some disabled students in KUFS, and we are going to help them. These students are few in some small universities, so if such schools have these students only once in 20 years, they won’t know how to support and deal with them. We often talk with them and consider ways to help them.

Q: Why did you decide to focus on the “studies” of students with disabilities?

Mr. Kuboyasu: Well… to help them, there are various forms of support by the state using taxes. These types of support are defined as, for example, when they have to go to the university, a helper is sent to push their wheelchair. However, this law is limited according to the situation such as when they can’t live without it. Therefore, in the university, they often can’t get the support from the state. Although studying is part of their life, if there is no group or organization to help them in the university, they can’t get any support for learning, such as taking notes in class, or moving around the classroom. So we have to fill in these gaps.

Q: What is the support for supporters?

Mr. Kuboyasu: You have seen our website a lot. Thank you very much. Well, there are various forms of support which require a lot of manpower. In this case, it is absolutely necessary to increase the number of supporters. And the more students and young people who have experienced the support for disabled students, the more people will notice barriers and the problem of the environment surrounding them, such as there being no braille textbooks or no voice assistance at the bus stop. Actually the disabilities are not the problems. So we have to change such an environment, and we are struggling with it. As a part of this effort, we do educate supporters well to improve the problem of not having enough supporters. For example, some of the diagonal support beams in the buildings on campus are actually dangerous for blind students because they have to use a guide cane to confirm their step, but they can not see around their head so they could hit their head on the pole. Only the architects are able to make such a pole, but if there is a person who has helped the blind or other disabled students, he or she might mention the pole. This is what changing the environment around them is. That’s why we try to educate our supporters.

Q: Why did you choose students, not adults or professionals as supporters?

Mr. Kuboyasu: It is not necessary to choose students, but we think there are a lot of good points for student supporters. We do help learning, so students studying the same thing as students with disabilities can provide better support. For example, if the disabled student who wants some learning support is in the faculty of medicine, and we are asked to support an experiment, we don’t know the way to do that at all. That’s why it’s better for them to be with someone who is really close. In addition to that, we think it is important that disabled students have a chance of choosing the student supporters or professionals. An environment where they do what they can do with fellow students and ask for a professional to do what they can’t do with them is the best for all of disabled students.

Q: What made you decide to support their school trips (school excursions) in addition to study support?

Mr. Kuboyasu: The problem of not being able to attend classes at school in the first place arose in many places. Especially in irregular situations such as school trips, the hurdles to participation tend to be higher. If a student says they don’t want to go, that’s their own choice. But due to pressure from others, for example, “It’s too dangerous” or “You might get hurt, so you shouldn’t go” or “Parents must come with them”…that is a problem. Unfortunately, these things happen a lot. Especially in the second or third year of high school, it is very uncomfortable for students at this age to go on a school trip accompanied by his or her parents. There may be some students who say it’s fine. But the conditions are different only for that student (who has the disability). There are a lot of students who give up on school trips because of this. This year, school trips have finally started to come back. And since April we have received a great deal of consultation, and those problems are still happening. I think it’s not good that problems are happening in the first place. And Kyoto happens to be a place where a lot of people come for school trips, with the Kinkakuji temple, Arashiyama, and various other places for school trips. So, Kyoto is a place where problems like that can easily happen.

Q: What kind of students have used UNI’s service so far?

Mr. Kuboyasu: The largest number of disabled people are in wheelchairs or have limb disabilities. In the first place, historical buildings are not barrier-free (universal design). For example, Kiyomizu-dera is at the top of a very steep slope and there are many gravel paths. It is very difficult to get up there. There are noticeably more environmental barriers when traveling. The majority of the children we work with are physically disabled. But some of our users have autism and need to be looked after, as their parents can not always accompany them. Furthermore, there is also the question of whether or not parents should accompany them on the trip. Also, it is not always possible for teachers to be with them all the time, but they need to be looked after. So, there are cases where UNI’s helpers go when necessary.

Q: Do the UNI’s supporters who are still university students also provide support for the students who have handicaps?

Mr, Kuboyasu: Yes. We think it is best if disabled students could have a student as a helper. When we go, in any case, the student has a helper qualification, or has received training equivalent to a helper qualification. I have been doing this (helping disabled students) since I was at university, but my age is getting older and older from high school and junior high school students. I guess in some ways it is easier to work with people who are closer in age.

In terms of physical disability, recently, in addition to supporting students with disabilities on school trips, we also have the whole class take our training as part of their school trip program. Of course, there are times when students with disabilities are among the students in the classroom who come to receive the training, and if that happens, it makes the experience even better. For example, we go to Kinkaku-ji together, including able-bodied people, and check for barrier-free access (accessibility). We do some thinking about any barriers in the system of school trips or in the education system itself. UNI has been conducting such training as part of the school trip program, so that students themselves can find barriers that might be a problem for disabled classmates in their everyday school life.

Q: Is it like teaching “Those places need more universal design” during the trip?

Mr. Kuboyasu: Yes. And the way of looking at the things that I mentioned earlier. It is not like that because their legs are disabled, so we have to do something about the legs to become better. It’s the system or the way the school is run that make it difficult for disabled students to participate in the first place. If the students in the surrounding environment were to become aware of that, maybe the barriers would become smaller. So, we are conducting training courses to make students aware of these issues. Of course, if there is something physically inaccessible, we will point that out as well.

Q: What kind of support is there depending on the type of disability, and what kind of consideration is given to it?

Mr. Kuboyasu: It’s easier to understand by seeing the similarities rather than the differences. As I said earlier, there are different functional disabilities, such as hearing, eyes, limbs, etc. But UNI considers the systems and people around them to be preventing participation, rather than the functional disabilities. Based on that aspect, the support depends on what the barriers are in each case. The most important thing is to find out how they can participate, so that they can participate beyond the barriers, and participate in the same way, and go on a school trip and receive training. For example, if the student is in a wheelchair, they may need assistance when they move around, or they may need someone to push them, or they may need a helper when they go to the toilet, and when they eat, sleep, and take a bath. School trips include such things, so assistance for those is necessary.

On the other hand, UNI has not been involved in school trips for the blind. But how we support when blind people go sightseeing is, whether there are things that can be understood by touch or not. For example, the stone pagoda at Ryoanji Temple is famous for its karesansui (dry landscape gardens). They don’t let you touch them, do they? It’s not easy to understand for blind people. However, there is actually a model of the garden there, that you can touch and check. If there is such a thing, students can understand what the stone garden is like, and if there is something they want to know, you can give information orally.

Well, sometimes we go on school trips, or rather, we go just for fun. But we go with students who cannot see, or with students in wheelchairs. It’s like if we are really doing a survey on accessibility or not. However, when we go outside, we discover many things.

In terms of hearing, we’ve done things like this: a junior high school student who couldn’t hear, went on a school trip to Okinawa. He couldn’t hear the guide but we didn’t have enough money to go with them to Okinawa. So, we used a communication system to get the voice of the guide, and we sent the written texts of the guide back to the student’s tablets. We have also provided support for school trips where students can listen to the guide’s explanations while looking at the objects, or listen to a lecture by a senior student, graduate or active member of society in real time.

Q: Are you focusing on the similarity of barriers rather than the differences in disability when you support school trips?

Mr. Kuboyasu: Yes. Basically, we think about what we can do to help them participate in the school trip. For example, we are sometimes asked if our child with disabilities can participate in the school trip in the first place from parents, or how to charter a care taxi from the school. The problem is how the child can participate in the school trip, but parents, teachers and even the student him/herself don’t think they can participate in the first place. If there is a problem from such a point of view, we start from there and say that it is normal for them to be able to participate. And then if there is a problem, we will do something about it. For example, there are questions from teachers such as whether a chartered taxi is necessary, or which type of care is better for us, or what we need to prepare depending on the assistance. The teachers want them to participate in the same way, but they don’t know what to do technically. So, UNI will figure out with the knowledge we have what to do in such a situation to help the student participate.

Q: I think there are environmental barriers such as hills and gravel roads. In order to support school trips, are there any places where you would like to see more barrier-free access?

Mr. Kuboyasu: In older buildings, there are usually many physical barriers. For example, when going up to Nijo Castle, the floor is too high to climb, but it is usually manageable.

In an extreme example, it was not a school excursion, but there was a study tour for wheelchair-bound students from a university specializing in antique arts. They were allowed to see relics from the Nara period, or to look closely at sliding doors in the temples from the Nara period, which they normally would not be allowed to enter. For the first time, a student in a wheelchair participated in such an event. The building was built in the Nara period, when there was no such thing as barrier-free access, and there were many barriers. Naturally, the buildings are full of barriers. But the reason why I didn’t feel any environmental barriers was because the teachers in charge of the department basically took the stance that the students should participate because this trip was a key course of the department. So, they were always trying to get the student to participate in the same way. The place they were going to was special, like a temple managed by an old lady who looked like a “Kyoto lady” so it was difficult to negotiate with her. We kept thinking about what we should do because the tatami mats would be damaged if we rode on them in a wheelchair, but we wanted the student to look at the sliding doors. So, I thought, ‘What should I do?’ We thought about having him go up and down on our back and sit down on the tatami and look at the sliding doors. If there was a narrow space that physically cannot be entered by two people in a wheelchair, we organized a different program for that area and had the student go to the museum while the others didn’t, and have an exchange of impressions later on.

Anyway, we spent about two weeks trying to figure out different ways. The places we went to were full of barriers, but there weren’t many barriers in terms of obstacles, and that student was able to participate in the two-week programmed rather smoothly. In that sense, the surrounding environment was very important. If the teacher had said that students in wheelchairs were not allowed to participate, and had taken the stance that it would be too difficult from the start, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do this, and the student probably wouldn’t have participated for two weeks. First of all, the teacher closer to the wheelchair devised a way to make it possible for the students to participate. By combining the expert’s knowledge of how we could do it without destroying the antiques and our (UNI) knowledge of assisting, we were able to do it. So, while we are most grateful that the building is barrier-free. It was also a benefit for us to know that it was possible to do this even in an ancient building, which is the opposite of barrier-free. In this sense, I sometimes wonder if it can be managed just by the awareness and consciousness of the people around, but I think that is a surprisingly important part of the project.

Reflections

In the interview with Mr. Kuboyasu, we learned how the stereotypes of the people around us affect the participation of disabled students on campus and on school trips. He told us how we can help people with disabilities. Many people think disabled students cannot do the same activities as others because of the disability or the activities are not barrier-free. However, the problem of not being able to participate is that people around disabled students and sometimes even the student him/herself has a misguided belief that they “cannot participate.” All students can participate in all school activities if the people around them and the student him/herself all believe that the disabled student can indeed participate. With this belief, teachers, parents, students, and UNI can think of ways to overcome the physical barriers that exist, such as the inaccessibility of the facility. It is important that the facilities around us are universally designed, however it is more important to cultivate the belief that “everyone can participate.”

To be inclusive toward people with disabilities, we should believe in the possibility of the disabled people. We can start by erasing the stereotype that it is difficult for disabled people to participate in any way. Then, we should always think of the way we can help those disabled people. The disabilities are not problems; we need to have some knowledge about the disabilities, for example, the physical environmental barriers that wheelchair people face. If we have the knowledge, we can avoid making those environmental barriers, such as small bumps on the road, that make it difficult for wheelchair users to ride upon. To change the environment to be more inclusive of disabled people, we should focus on the solutions, not the problem.

Researchers

Hi, I’m Mao Kemmotsu from Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. I’m in the Faculty of Global Engagement, Department of Global Tourism. I am from Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo, but I live in Kyoto now. I love trips and Kyoto! So I enrolled in this university to learn language, tourism, and the culture of Kyoto. I played softball from 9 to 15 years old. For now I love softball and I think softball and the people I met through it absolutely changed my life. I learned a lot from them, and it gave me the base of my humanity. I love Japanese culture, tradition, architecture and history, so Kyoto is the most special place for me. I’m really happy to live and learn there! I’m also excited to join this project. It’s one of the wonderful gifts which Kyoto gave me.

Hello everyone! My name is Mizuki Kobata. I am a student of Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in Kyoto, Japan. I am in the Faculty of Global Engagement. I major in Global Tourism. I am from Osaka. I enjoy traveling to explore new cultures. This is why I chose Global Tourism as my major. I’ve been to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and Taiwan with my family. I lived in New Zealand for three years and went to high school there. I met a lot of people from different cultural backgrounds which inspired me a lot. In my free time, I enjoy visiting museums, temples, and shrines. Kyoto has many museums, temples and shrines which attract me a lot. Every time I visit those places, I learn new things about the culture and history of Japan which is really interesting.