- Rediscovering Japan: Green Tourism

The phrase "green tourism" is heard more often these days in Japan. This term, widely used in Europe, is often equated in Japan with "rural experiences" or "old-fashioned hometown experiences." To most Japanese a "tour" used to mean a group tour featuring a drinking party in the evening. However, as people become more affluent, they are starting to show more of a desire to spend time in nature and to experience rural life in the agricultural, mountain and fishing villages where Japanese culture arose.

The phrase green tourism started coming into use in Japan around 1992, when the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries established a study group on green tourism. The concept was inspired by urban dwellers in Europe who spend time in rural areas to just rest, relax and appreciate rural values, and the study group began exploring how to raise the awareness of city residents in Japan about the values of agricultural, mountain and fishing villages, and bring about active human exchanges through agricultural activities. Green tourism is now considered a key to establishing communication and cooperation between urban and rural areas. It also plays a considerable part in enhancing Japan's appeal to tourists from overseas who would like to get beyond its mega-cities like Tokyo and Osaka and experience its traditional culture and natural beauty.

To promote green tourism in an integrated manner, the Organization for Urban-Rural Interchange Revitalization was established in 2001 to provide information and help develop human resources. It launched a portal site to supply information on green tourism and also publishes brochures and guidebooks. It supports regional revitalization and promotes exchanges, while exploring the needs of people in both urban and rural areas in an attempt to build a new mechanism in which both sides can feel fulfilled.

Also in 2003, a new network to promote urban-rural communication and cooperation was created. The network's nickname, "All Right! Nippon," has a double meaning: "all right" in English and oh-rai in Japanese, which literally means "traffic" or "coming and going." Thus the nickname is supposed to conjure up images of people actively moving between urban and rural areas and of Japan becoming an all-right and healthy society where people can enjoy both types of lifestyle. The network started to present All Right! Nippon Awards in the same year to groups that promote urban-rural exchanges in various ways nationwide. It aims to further develop green tourism through awarding and publicizing such activities.

Japanese people are notorious for rarely taking long vacations and only taking short ones, typically over a long weekend. Another difference with Europeans is in the main purpose of their holidays. In Europe, people use their vacations to simply enjoy their stay and relax. By contrast, Japanese people often hope to have experiences not available to them in their daily lives. Such experiences might include preparing traditional, healthy local specialties such as soybean paste and buckwheat noodles, making crafts using wood or bamboo, agricultural or forestry work such as harvesting crops or pruning trees, and sports such as horseback riding and rafting. To meet these expectations, host facilities need to expend considerable effort to prepare programs involving hands-on experiences. Information about such programs is disseminated on the websites local governments and the Organization for Urban-Rural Interchange Revitalization mentioned above.

Promoting interchanges and cooperation between urban cities and rural (agricultural, mountain and fishing) villages through green tourism is significant in two ways. First, it can deepen people's understanding of rural communities and create a framework to conserve the rural environment. Green tourism can provide urban dwellers, who tend to live in total isolation from nature, with opportunities to have first-hand experiences at the actual sites of food production. They can see how vegetables and fruits grow with their own eyes, and experience planting and weeding rice paddies, as well as rice harvesting.

These experiences perforce give them a deeper insight into the production and distribution of the food they eat daily. Particularly for children, every experience they have in these villages may profoundly influence their later lives.

The promotion of green tourism means a lot to rural inhabitants as well. More and more villagers try to learn traditional techniques presently practiced only by elderly people so that they can show or teach these techniques to visitors from cities. Initially, many villages built facilities for hands-on experiences, exchange centers and local special produce markets to attract more visitors from cities. Eventually, however, these efforts led many villagers to review and revitalize their own communities. They have also been encouraged to rediscover, revaluate and protect the history and culture of their own villages.

During the post World War II period of rapid economic growth in Japan, the population became concentrated in urban areas, and rural regions lost jobs and workers. The depopulation of villages has become such a serious problem that the Japanese term for it - kaso - is sometimes understood even outside the country. Today more than two-thirds of farmers in Japan are 65 years old or older.

Green tourism helps bring people and money back to rural regions from cities, thereby contributing to the protection and revitalization of rural regions. One good example involves an urban-rural cooperative program to preserve terraced paddy fields. Here, urban residents have established a sponsoring system in which they provide funds and visit sponsored rice fields several times a year to plant seedlings, weed and harvest the rice, thereby helping farmers during the busiest times of the year.

Urban dwellers are refreshed by these unusual experiences, and also get a share of the crops that they help grow. Rural farmers can keep their rice fields in good order and secure a stable income and some helping hands, even though for short periods, through such a sponsoring system. The system makes both parties happy, facilitates communication between them, and nurtures the sense of cooperatively conserving terraced rice fields.

Another important contribution of green tourism is to the economy. According the 2003 White Paper on Leisure, the average number of unused paid holidays per year for all workers in Japan was nine days per person. If they had taken these nine days off, total leisure expenditures would have increased by 11.8 trillion yen (about U.S. $110 billion), creating 1,480,000 new jobs. A survey indicates that in 2002 the average number of nights spent at paid accommodation during holidays was 3.5 by the Japanese, a very small number compared with 20.1 for Germans or 15.8 for the French.

The number of new jobs mentioned above amounts to 44 percent of the total number of the unemployed (3,400,000) in 2002. If more people spent their holidays in agricultural, mountain, and fishing villages, the currently stagnant economy could be energized. An analogy could be drawn with blood (people and money) which formerly circulated only around the heart (cities) starting to reach the whole body (all of Japan) including the extremities (villages). In this way, green tourism could revitalize the entire Japanese economy.

Green tourism in Japan is now just a minor movement. However, it is expected to grow slowly but steadily, since it does provide both urban and rural residents with intensely enjoyable experiences. Reflecting on our lifestyle and lifecourse leads us to wonder about what is really important and what we really want to do in life. Green tourism may provide an opportunity to rediscover our own souls, our own locality and our country, something that clearly cannot be gained through an ordinary sightseeing tour.

[Reference]
Green Tourism Portal Site
http://www.furusato.or.jp/eng/

(Staff Writer Hiroyo Hasegawa)

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