Tony McNicol talks to writer, entrepreneur and tourism ambassador Alex Kerr
Alex Kerr is the author of Lost Japan, a memoir of his experiences in Japan’s traditional arts, and Dogs and Demons, which details how post-war government misrule destroyed Japan’s countryside. Based in Kyoto and Bangkok, during recent years Kerr has devoted much of his time to supporting tourism to Japan. Among the many projects with which he is involved are a farmhouse in Shikoku’s beautiful Iya valley, and the restoration of traditional houses on Ojika, a small island in Nagasaki prefecture.
Why do so few foreign tourists visit Japan?
Up to the early 1990s, tourism was viewed in Japan as a quaint thing that behind-the-times European countries do. Tourism of any type was seen as a sideline to the real business of an important economic power – which is making things. So Japan has lingered at about 30th in the world for inbound tourism – somewhere between Tunisia and Croatia. Tourism is the world’s biggest business, actually, but Japan completely missed the boat.
From a domestic point of view – really since the early 1990s –tourism has been flat or declining, mostly. [The number of] Japanese tourists going abroad has been increasing by leaps and bounds throughout this period. The upshot is that Japanese are bored travelling in their own country, and foreigners don’t come here.
Have there been attempts to boost inbound tourism?
The first leading politician to pay any attention to the issue was [Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro] Koizumi. This would be in the early 2000s, near the end of his tenure. He started getting some money put into tourism. He also named me and a group of other people tourist ambassadors. [In 2008] they established a tourism agency. So now, finally, Japan has a tourism agency.
There was a very successful campaign called Visit Japan. They managed to more or less double the number of tourists coming to Japan, from approximately four million in the late ’90s to over eight million last year. So it was extremely successful.
But that doesn’t even put Japan in the top 30, because everybody else in the world was [increasing inbound tourism] during the same period. So Japan is still far behind a lot of countries including, in Asia, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and, of course, China.
The thing is that tourism matters, especially as Japan’s manufacturing industry will undoubtedly continue to hollow out. It’s a crucial industry that Japan needs to establish, support and get going.
But do rural areas really have the resources – not least the people – to increase tourism?
Well, this is the key thing. Depopulation is Japan’s premier national issue in my view. I’ve done a lot of reading and writing about this lately – and thinking about it. You don’t notice it when you are in Tokyo, which is actually growing. But the minute you get out of the big cities you begin to see the shuttered shops. It’s huge, but not spread evenly. So big cities like Tokyo and Osaka are actually growing; slightly smaller cities like Kyoto and Yokohama hold their own.
Meanwhile, rural Tokushima prefecture in Shikoku will lose 30% of its population in the next 20 years. The smaller the cities or prefectures are, the faster they are losing people. What it amounts to is that rural towns of Japan are in drastic trouble. And it’s amazing how little attention foreign journalists and economists are paying to it. I think it is because they are based here in Tokyo and they literally don’t see it.
Can tourism help prevent depopulation?
One thing that can be done is to depopulate gracefully, which means you use it as an opportunity to tear down all the mismanaged projects and empty factories, and roads that can no longer be maintained, and all the crap that was built over these decades. It can now be condemned, removed and turned into public parks, and so on.
But where the tourism comes in is that it is a brilliant way of getting outsiders to come in because it’s an attractive industry for young people. Young people don’t want to do jobs like forestry. That work is tough and dangerous. Why do it in a wealthy country like this? But working behind a hotel desk in the hospitality business or driving a car, being a designer, architect or entertainer – there are many aspects to tourism – young people enjoy it and will do it.
We’ve got young people coming to the Iya valley from Osaka and other places to work with us. It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s challenging, and it’s the kind of work they want to do. Some of them end up staying, getting married, having kids. So slowly, bit by bit, the population can be stabilised through creating jobs.
Please tell us about your project in Ojika
Ojika [a small island two-hour’s ferry ride from Nagasaki] is a completely beautiful and magical place. It has beaches; it has huge old banyan trees; it had what they call hidden Christians [the Christians who went underground during the long Edo period persecution], so there is a wonderful Meiji-era [1868-1912] Gothic church on a rocky hillside; it has huge old houses; it has kayaking and fishing.
Ojika has a plan to restore 10 houses over five years. And in the last three years we have done five houses and a restaurant: completely restored them, making them very modern, very comfortable with under-floor heating and really gorgeous baths.
By the way, I was also named Ojika tourist ambassador. Of course I do a lot more for Ojika than I was ever asked to do for the country. So, in a way, that’s the more real one for me.
Ojika is quite some distance even from Nagasaki. Wouldn’t tourists rather stick to Tokyo and Kyoto?
Not everybody wants to go to a place like Ojika, but there is a segment among foreign visitors who think in these terms: “We’d love to see Tokyo because it’s the vibrant capital. We’d love to see Kyoto because it’s the ancient cultural centre. And we’d really love to see the real, the old Japan – of the mountains, or the sea – what we read about, and have an image of. But where can we go? Where does that exist?”
Of course it mostly doesn’t exist. Finally, after schlepping to get to some distant place, what you find is a ryokan with fluorescent lights and lime green astroturf rugs. Then you think, is this what I came for?
But when people get there and find a beautiful old house that’s true to what it had been, but also really comfortable with nice toilets and baths, well, people are thrilled. So, yes, people will go. I think we’ve hardly scratched the surface of the demand for that.
What effect have the disasters had on inbound tourism?
The earthquake per se wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was the nuclear issue. And that’s drastic. There’s been a precipitous decline in tourism. I was more optimistic before, but now I’m less optimistic because of the mismanagement by the government and the lack of what seems to be any willingness to study, measure or control the contamination. It’s a matter of bureaucratic impetus.
But [even in Tohoku] once you go far enough north, they are hundreds of kilometres away from the nuclear plant. Remember, the tsunami hit a huge stretch of coastline. And the radioactivity contaminated area is just a small part of it, really.
I think you can get tourists to go to Tohoku, and I think they will go there once someone does something worthwhile. One form of tourism today is “volunteer tourism,” where people go to try to help in some way. So actually the tourism challenge is a very interesting one. And I think there are big possibilities, actually.
What next?
Unfortunately we’ve been limited until now because most of our activities have been government projects. I’m looking now to take my efforts to the next stage, and I am looking for private investors to do this on a larger scale around the country, because I think there are opportunities. What we’ve done so far proves that there is demand, that people will spend money, and that it will work. There are so many fantastic properties out there – if they were only handled properly.