English speech therapist sets out to serve military families in western Tokyo

Hazel Pangilinan provides speech therapy services at a ShisaCare office in Japan in October 2023. (Chris Leigh)

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — A company that provides hard-to-find English speech therapy services across Japan plans to open a clinic next month near this air travel hub in western Tokyo.

ShisaCare’s fourth location will be just outside Yokota’s main gate in Fussa, said Marisa Yagi, founder of Yagi Speech Inc. and wife of a retired Marine.

The first ShisaCare opened in 2020 in Okinawa in an office located a 10-minute drive from Kadena Air Base. Yagi’s husband, then captain. Nicholas Connolly, served with the III Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Hansen.

ShisaCare is accepted by Tricare and some foreign health insurance plans. The clinics in Japan are run by Yagi, who now lives in Denver.

“We really love working with Tricare,” she told Stars and Stripes during an Oct. 10 video call.

ShisaCare’s other clinics are outside Yokosuka Naval Base, south of Tokyo, and Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station, near Hiroshima.

The company has about 250 regular customers in Japan and has helped about 500 people over the past three and a half years, Yagi said.

Its clients are 80% active duty families and 20% entrepreneurs and other foreigners living in Japan. Eighty percent are between birth and 15 years old and 20% are 16 and older, she said.

Yagi therapists are the most widely used Tricare network providers for speech therapy in Japan, Peter Graves, a Defense Health Agency spokesman, told Stars and Stripes via email Tuesday.

The company also provides physical therapy, occupational therapy and applied behavior analysis, or ABA, services to autistic children in Okinawa and Yokosuka.

ShisaCare founder Marisa Yagi is offering speech therapy services at her clinic in Okinawa in July 2022. (Jessica Drawdy)

In Iwakuni, ShisaCare offers in-office ABA and online speech therapy. If one of the company’s services is not available at one of its locations, it is allowed to offer therapy online, Yagi said.

Speech therapy is not available at U.S. bases in Japan, although Tricare covers some costs for off-base private providers, Graves said.

Yagi said she moved as a child because her father worked for the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. She understands how difficult speech therapy can be to find in Japan; her two younger siblings are hard of hearing and have difficulty speaking while living abroad, she said.

A Japanese American, Yagi specializes in bilingual speech therapy. She said she has a bachelor’s degree in art and communication disorders, as well as a master’s degree in speech pathology, all from the University of Wyoming.

Yagi said she is accredited by the American Speech and Hearing Association and holds professional certifications in California, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.

Tricare checks each provider’s licensing, professional training, qualifications, malpractice insurance and other requirements before enrolling them in the network, Graves said.

ShishaCare therapists are trained to identify children who have difficulty communicating, Yagi said.

Speech and language delays and disorders can pose significant problems for children and their families, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent, volunteer group of national experts in disease prevention and medicine. factual.

Data suggest that school-age children with speech or language delays may be at increased risk for learning and literacy disabilities, including difficulties in reading and writing.

Five percent of American children ages 3 to 17 have a speech disorder that lasted a week or more in the past 12 months, according to a March study by the National Institute on Deafness and others communication disorders.

Of ShisaCare’s 45 employees, about 30 are military spouses.

“Our business model has always been to start with military spouses,” Yagi said. “So when I started the program, I was a speech therapist myself, and all the other programs were started by military spouses.