Miraikan Case Study

How could Miraikan cope well with globalization?

The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, simply known as the Miraikan, is an experience-based science museum that provides the visitors with an opportunity to think about how the mankind should approach the future with science and technology literally. Being Japan’s one of the most famous science museum located in Odaiba, a sightseeing spot well known to the world, it attracts visitors not only from Japan locally, but from all over the world, with the visitors from the English speaking world being the most. Miraikan is facing a trend of rapid globalization of itself particularly due to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, and it is expected that a numerous number of visitors from
In contrast to the science communicators as the regular staffs, volunteers are irregular staffs with no wages paid except for the travel expenses. The application for volunteers is conducted online usually twice a year, where there has conventionally been only a space to fill in the personal statement to show one’s strengths or the reasons why they want to work as a volunteer on the application form. There has never been an English language requirement for volunteers, whereas there are for the science communicators. It is not recommended to set an English language requirement when recruiting the volunteers, as the number of applicants will drop dramatically which will result in the human resources being radically insufficient. However, it is necessary to provide a space to optionally fill in the scores of a standardized English test and thereby show the applicants Miraikan’s status that consider English ability is important provided that presence or absence of those scores will not affect the overall consideration for selection. It is also a good opportunity for Miraikan to grasp the rough number of applicants capable of using English in every period of
The contents also covers the fundamental grammars helpful for explaining the contents of the exhibits and for other situations such as guiding the visitors on how to get to a particular facility they want to go to and letting them know how to enjoy a particular type of service. Most importantly, what cannot be forgot to be taught to them is the theories on how to entertain the visitors from abroad, or on how to deal with the problems caused by visitors from different cultures, or something like that. In order to give them an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained in the lessons to the real world, there is a 1 hour long optional model practice session held once every week, where they will play roles as the foreign visitors and randomly ask some questions to another in English, and then be given a response. The response given and the attitude will be later evaluated to figure out what is good about it and what needs to be improved. These activities will allow the volunteers to gain adequate knowledge and techniques needed when they help the visitors from abroad with