Welcome to the second week of the second month of the United Nations-designated "International Year of Volunteers." To mark this joyous occasion, we are pleased to announce the release of a book named "Kokusai Volunteer Guido," aka "Inside International Volunteer Work," published by The Japan Times and written by Midori Paxton.
It is not the purpose of this column to urge everybody in Japan to rush off and buy several hundred copies (although it might not be a bad idea).
Nor do we intend to detail the 10 years spent scouring the globe in search of organizations that accept, sometimes desperately need, volunteers in fields ranging from famine relief to radio-tracking endangered tortoises.