A Consideration on the Education for Counseling Psychologist: The Need to Extract the Specific Counseling Competencies Required to Work in a Japanese-style Multicultural Society

Abstract

This article discusses the future of counselor education in an increasingly globalized Japanese society. First, it provides an overview of insights into multicultural counseling competencies in North America and education on developing these competencies. Various manifest and latent disparities (race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) regarding power and influence, and their complexity and intersectionality have gained growing interest in recent years, both domestically and internationally. The capability(competency) to effectively interact with its environment will be required of counselors henceforth, while an educational curriculum for such a capacity will be required in counselor education. This study demonstrates the need to extract the specific counseling competencies required to work in a Japanese-style multicultural society and to examine their determining factors.