This paper reviewed the current condition of the support services for foreign residents in Japan to identify the challenges in developing psychological services that meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse populations. A conceptual multicultural competent practice model from the US is introduced and the importance of its ecological perspective is discussed, after which the study examines the influence of Japan’s multicultural co-existence policy on the development of support services.

It was found that taking a community psychological approach that identifies the contextual factors, which influence service development decision-making processes, could contribute to the provision of culturally competent services. The author stressed the importance of the community-based research to reveal diverse needs in the community. The engagement of professionals who represent minority populations and the majority members’ involvement are also essential to service development.

Multilingual diversity is increasing in Japan as the rising number of people with different culture backgrounds are living in Japan. The needs of communities are changing in tandem with the change of members living in the community. Offering mental health services in the preferred language(s) of these community members is considered important due to the barriers that non-Japanese language speakers face when seeking mental health support from mainstream services. However, multilingual mental health support services provided in Japan is highly inadequate and restricted. This paper is an overview of the current state and challenges of provided multilingual mental health support in Japan. Furthermore, a few proposals are provided based on the current situation: first, clarifying the support needs of communities and increasing multilingual mental health support system matching the community need is critical; second, in order to increase multilingual services, education and training for nurturing young generation who can take the role is necessary; third, clarifying existing multilingual mental health support resources and reinforcing the effective collaboration between multilingual professionals and non-multilingual professionals is necessary; fourth, it is important that practicing multilingual mental health support should be considered as a professional competency more than only language ability.

Based on the support practice of a school counselor, the following influential factors affecting school adjustment for children connected to China who attend Japanese public elementary and junior high schools were elucidated: Japanese language ability, arrival time in Japan, decisions on arrival in Japan, effect of family relationships, student characteristics, and the effect of student groups. Then, the author introduced the methods that were used to provide support, and also discussed possible future issues such as children’s intercultural adaptation processes, support for Chinese children and their parents, and collaboration with external resources.

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.

Photo-Based Communication (PBC) is an educational program that aims to increase self-expression ability and self-esteem through communication activities using photographs. It is composed of two sub-programs: “Discovery” and “Taking Photos to Express Thoughts”. The objective of this research project was to determine the psychological and educational effects of PBC on participating children. To that end, study was conducted. Study was a questionnaire survey of 29 students in the fifth and sixth grades of elementary school. The results of the survey showed that children felt an extremely high degree of satisfaction with participation in PBC, and that participation in PBC caused them to improve the self-esteem through photographic expression, as well as to understand that they and their friends see things in different ways. Some thoughts on the effects of PBC on children and the significance of using PBC in the classroom are offered here based on these results.