Goin' My Way?
In the March 3, 2003 edition of Forbes, they went on a rant about the suffering Japanese tourism industry. Ha! I didn't even think such a thing existed.
But lo, sure enough the current prime minister, Juichiro Koizumi, has got a PLAN. By the year 2010, he hopes to double the number of tourists dollars that visit the island ...from $3 billion to $6 billion.
Sounds like a lot, but if you weigh this figure of foreign visitors forking out their hard-earned cash on their holidays to other nations, Japan is below Croatia as a tourist draw.
Granted, Japan beats out the tourist revenue to New Zealand ($2 billion), and Finland ($1 billion), but even my own dear frozen country Canada ranks in the top ten in tourism ($11 billion...the US is number one with $72 billion...but Americans also travelled the most and spent $43 billion abroad).
So what is wrong with visiting the second largest economy in the world...err...the land of the rising sun?
Lots.
According to Pleasant Holidays, a U.S. firm founded in 1959 that is devoted to Asian travel, a 7-day package trip to Japan will cost $1,250; a similar package to China costs $850.
My own fact finding mission proved that even international hotels and toursit relations are staffed with people with little or no competence with the world's most widely used language...English, making it impossible to communicate. Add to that the humiliation, for many Westerners who are forced to sleep on lumpy futons on grass-mat floors, awakened at 7 am in the morning to run down to eat a kipper, a raw egg on white, bland rice, and you can see it's not everyone's idea of a Holiday Inn experience.
Lack of hotel luxury aside, once you get to the island, it's astronomically expensive to travel within the country. Even the locals don't travel much given the expense. To wit, the Shinkansen (Bullet train) from Tokyo to Nagoya costs $100 one way, not including snacks or other details. A similar distance, say between Toronto and Ottawa, costs $45 US.
Besides, what is the value of traveling to an island nation? If you land in Asia, a better place to be is Bangkok, Singapore, or even Hong Kong, for the proximity to other Asian nations. When going to Japan, it is about that one contry and that's it.
Part of the problem with tourism in Japan stems from how Japan is marketed. One is reminded constantly of Geisha, Cherry Blossoms, and Samurai Warriors. Occasionally we get news stories on how awful the economy is faring, and we see glimpses on TV about the grey, dirty heavy-industry sites and faceless salarymen in overcrowded trains--or a twentysmething woman dresse up like a Kewpie Doll in a ridiculously shrill high pitched voice "manning" an elevator.
What we don't know is what is on the minds of the Jpaanese. We don't see "la vie quotidien", the up to the minute things a Tokyoite or a Kyotan get up to. Why not?
In their push to Westernize, they forgot one inportant thing--to tell us about themselves. Now they really are a faceless mass--not only because of the lack of information they provied about themselves, but even the type of information they pass off to one another.
In short, it's a hard place to travel to because even the locals have trouble in telling you anything about themselves because, in reality, they really don't know.
For my money, anywhere but Japan is the place to travel to.
Gaga | 4:47 PM
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