Hazel Pangilinan provides speech therapy 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 airlift 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 the spouse of a retired Marine.
The first ShisaCare opened in 2020 on Okinawa at an office a 10-minute drive from Kadena Air Base. Yagi’s husband, then-Capt. Nicholas Connolly, served with III Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Hansen.
ShisaCare is accepted by Tricare and some foreign health insurance. The clinics in Japan are managed by Yagi, who now lives in Denver.
“We really enjoy working with Tricare,” she told Stars and Stripes on an Oct. 10 video call.
ShisaCare’s other clinics are outside Yokosuka Naval Base south of Tokyo and Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni near Hiroshima.
The company has around 250 regular clients in Japan and has helped around 500 people in the past 3 ½ years, Yagi said.
Her clients are 80% active duty families and 20% contractors and other foreigners living in Japan. Eighty percent are from newborn to 15 years old and 20% are 16 and older, she said.
Yagi’s therapists are the highest utilized 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, for children with autism in Okinawa and Yokosuka.
ShisaCare founder Marisa Yagi provides speech therapy at her Okinawa clinic in July 2022. (Jessica Drawdy)
In Iwakuni, ShisaCare offers ABA in an office setting and speech therapy online. If one of the company’s services is unavailable at one of its locations, it’s approved to offer online therapy, Yagi said.
Speech therapy is not available on U.S. bases in Japan, although Tricare does cover some costs for private, off-base providers, Graves said.
Yagi said she moved around as a child because her father worked for U.S. Embassy Tokyo. She understands how speech therapy can be difficult to find in Japan; her two younger siblings are hard of hearing and struggled with speech while living abroad, she said.
A Japanese American, Yagi specializes in bilingual speech language therapy. She said she holds bachelor’s degrees in art and communication disorders, and a master’s degree in speech-language pathology, all from the University of Wyoming.
Yagi said she is accredited by the American Speech and Hearing Association and holds California, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Wyoming professional certifications.
Tricare verifies each provider’s licensing, professional education, qualifications, malpractice insurance and other requirements prior to enlisting them in the network, Graves said.
ShishaCare therapists are trained to identify children with 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 panel of national experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine.
Evidence suggests that school-aged children with speech or language delays may be at increased risk of learning and literacy disabilities, including difficulties with reading and writing.
Five percent of U.S. children ages 3 to 17 have a speech disorder that lasted for a week or longer during the past 12 months, according to a March study by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
Of the 45 ShisaCare employees, about 30 are military spouses.
“Our business model has always been to start with military spouses,” Yagi said. “So, when I initially started the program, I was a speech therapist myself, and all the other programs were started by military spouses.”
