As Fukushima residents return, some see hope in nuclear tourism
Fukushima tourism finally rebounds from 2010’s triple disasters
« Ask anyone who has visited, and they’ll tell you: Tohoku, Northern Japan is easily one of the most stunning places in the world. »
Bike Project to Bring Tourists Back to Fukushima
Skiing in Fukushima
Fukushima mounts winter tourism offensive to draw foreign tourists to its snowy charms
A project will kick off in Fukushima Prefecture this winter to lure more foreign tourists to its snowy hills and mountains to help revitalize depopulated regions.
For starters, the prefecture will invite tourists from Taiwan, Thailand and Australia to Okuaizu, Urabandai and southern areas of the prefecture, and subsidize nearly all of their transportation and accommodation costs. About 200 people are expected to participate.
The purpose of the project is to promote Fukushima’s name overseas, raise occupancy at its hotels and inns, and bolster jobs in its tourism industry.
The project will run until fiscal 2018. The Fukushima Prefectural Government plans to earmark about ¥17 million from the central government’s local revitalization subsidies to finance the first year.
The prefecture is coordinating with travel agencies so that areas including the towns of Minamiaizu, Kaneyama and Bandai, as well as the villages of Kitashiobara and Tenei, can welcome visitors from Australia, where skiing is very popular, and Taiwan and Thailand, where Fukushima has tourism offices.
The four towns and villages will get three tours each, including an overnight journey, with the prefecture shouldering most of the transport and accommodation fees.
Each tour is designed so participants can ski, snowboard and have snowball fights in Fukushima’s powder snow, as well as enjoy local snow festivals. There are also plans to reserve a ski resort for a whole weekday just for foreign visitors.
In addition, tourists will be invited to soak in hot springs to interact with local residents after experiencing snow-removal activities. This will be followed by chances to sample the local cuisine and taste sake popular at home and abroad.
Other trips are being planned to famous tourist spots along the Tadami Line, which has gained an overseas following on the internet, and to fishing spots where pond smelt can be caught in Hibara and Hatori lakes.
Once the visitors return home, the project encourages them to spread information on the ski resorts, tourist spots, food and sake they experienced via SNS.
Already, the Fukushima Prefectural Government is looking to create more tours that appeal to a wider range of countries, including China and South Korea.
It intends to set up a study group comprising officials from cities, towns, villages and local tourism associations to analyze the participants’ reactions. Based on the results, the prefecture will set up multiple tourism routes to draw attention ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
“Amid tepid demand from Japanese skiers, if the prefecture successfully emphasizes the high quality of its snow, it is possible to lure more tourists from abroad,” said a source connected with a ski resort in the Aizu region.
“We’d like to design a model tour to make the mountainous areas popular in winter,” an official in the prefecture’s regional development section said.
Even though tourism has rebounded since the Fukushima disaster unfolded in 2011, it has not fully recovered.
Last year, foreign tourists who stayed at lodging facilities with more than 20 employees in Fukushima came to 48,090, more than double the 2011 tally, according to the Japan Tourism Agency.
But that’s still far short of the 87,170 who did so in 2010, and the prefecture is hunting for more ways to raise tourism in cooperation with its neighbors in the Tohoku and Kanto regions.
Fukushima Possibly Turning into Another “Exotic” Tourist Destination
Just like Chernobyl before it, the radioactive exclusion zone surrounding the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is starting to attract tourists, possibly turning into another of the world’s “exotic” tourist destinations.
Unlike the Chernobyl nuclear disaster which happened over 30 years ago, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant catastrophe is practically a recent event. On March 11, 2011 a tsunami that followed the Tohoku earthquake smashed into the plant, causing several meltdowns and the release of radioactive material resulting in the second nuclear disaster in history to be given the Level 7 event classification of the International Nuclear Event Scale.
Yet even though the scars left by this disaster are still fresh, it seems that there are already people who consider the radioactive zone surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant a tourist attraction.
The first project aimed at transforming the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into a tourist attraction was presented to the Japanese authorities in 2012, only a year after the disaster, by philosopher Hiroki Azuma, the author of the Chernobyl Dark Tourism Guide, and his group of fellow enthusiasts.
According to Azuma’s vision, people should’ve been allowed to visit the area and see the process of the Fukushima plant’s decontamination with their own eyes; and by 2036 visitors should be able to approach the plant without the need to wear protective suits
Unfortunately, the prefectural administration torpedoed the idea, arguing that the word ‘tourism’ should never be applied to the catastrophe site.
But even though Azuma’s project was not to be, there are already plenty of companies organizing tours in the disaster area.
Hiroshi Miura, head of one such enterprise called NPO Nomado, told Sputnik that he first started working as a tour guide for people visiting his home city of Minamisoma, located 16 miles north of the Fukushima nuclear plant, back in 2012.
“In October 2012 I established a non-commercial organization Nomada and continued my business by creating a ’20 Kilometers Away From Fukushima-1′ tour. By 2014, just by myself, I had over 5,000 clients. In 2015 other guides and volunteers started working with me, and over 10,000 people participated in our tours,” he said.
Miura also added that the current situation at the nuclear plant is barely discussed by the media, except for the local prefectural outlets, and that the place where he used to live, located only 12 kilometers away from Fukushima Daiichi, remains in the same state as it was right after the tsunami, as no decontamination or recovery operations were conducted there.
Yuta Hirai, another tour guide working in Fukushima, also told Sputnik that there are people from all walks of life interested in visiting the site of the tragedy: scientists, students, former residents, and a considerable number of foreign tourists.
He also believes that tourism could play an important role in helping the Fukushima prefecture to recover from the ordeal of 2011.
“I believe it is important for the prefecture residents to understand that people from without are paying attention to them. They have mixed feelings about the incident, like ‘I want to forget but I don’t want to be forgotten.’ If we learn our lesson from what happened, if we understand that it must not happen again, then it could help the people of Fukushima to believe in themselves. There’s a tendency to pay greater attention to opinions from without rather than to opinions from within. So if more people from other prefectures see the situation with their own eyes, feel it and talk about it, then perhaps the current depressing situation in Fukushima may change for the better,” he said.
Promoted Fukushima Tourism Booming
Fukushima Attracts 50 Million Tourists Annually for the First Time Since the Nuclear Disaster
Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture has hit a tourism milestone, drawing in more than 50 million visitors in the past year, according to data released by the Fukushima Prefectural Government.
The prefecture drew in a total of 50.31 million tourists, making it the first time this annual threshold has been achieved since the nuclear disaster of 2011.
According to the The Japan Times, the area has seen a recovery of close to 90 percent since then, which officials in the region contribute to several factors.
Last year, Fukushima officials launched the “Fukushima Destination Campaign,” tapping into the country’s transportation resources to offering railway deals and promotions.
Officials pointed to the opening of the section between the Tomioka and Namie interchanges on the Jōban Expressway last March as a key player in the surge of visitors in eastern Fukushima last year, which was up 59.9 percent from 2014.
The opening of new leisure facilities and a re-emergence of the area’s famous hot springs is also helping draw in visitors.
Above all, the data found that travelers were most drawn to the prefecture’s natural sights, with destinations like the Bandai-kogen highlands drawing in a total of 2.18 million visitors last year.
http://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/nature-travel/fukushima-tourism-rebound
Fukushima tourism making strong progress on “recovery”
This is an article from the Fukushima Minpo News, the Fukushima local newspaper which is the propaganda organ of the Japanese central government. Therefore everything announced in this article should be taken with a grain of salt. Or maybe those tourists are the ones who enjoy sightseeing the numerous contaminated soil bags dump sites.
Tourism in Fukushima Prefecture approached a milestone in fiscal 2015 after recovering to nearly 90 percent of where it was before the nuclear disaster unfolded in March 2011, the prefectural government said in a recent tourism report.
In the year ended March 31, the prefecture saw 50.31 million tourists visit its resorts, sightseeing spots and leisure facilities, data compiled by the Fukushima Prefectural Government showed earlier this month.
That’s an increase of 3.42 million on the year before and nearly 90 percent of its tourism tally in fiscal 2010, when 57.17 million tourists visited, the report said.
It is also the first time the annual threshold of 50 million has been achieved since 2011, when the Great East Japan Earthquake tipped the Fukushima No. 1 power plant into a triple core meltdown on March 11.
Fukushima officials praised their promotion drive, dubbed the “Fukushima Destination Campaign,” for bearing fruit. The campaign allows its municipalities to tap the transport resources of the Japan Railway group across the country.
“We will work to draw more tourists by analyzing the effect of the Destination Campaign,” said a Fukushima prefectural official in charge of tourism promotion.
In a surprise, the Soma-Futaba region in eastern Fukushima, along the Pacific coast, drew 2.65 million tourists in fiscal 2015, up 59.9 percent from last year, the report said. Officials say the opening of a key part of the Joban Expressway between the Tomioka and Namie interchanges in March 2015 facilitated the surge. Indeed, the number of people who used drive-in facilities was 33.4 percent higher than last year, the report said.
The opening of new leisure facilities and the resumption of some onsen (hot spring) spas that suspended business in the wake of the disasters also contributed, the officials said.
Tourists were most attracted by the grand nature of Fukushima Prefecture, the data showed. The top spot in fiscal 2015 remained the Bandai Kogen highlands in the north, which drew 2.18 million visitors, up 4.6 percent from the year before.
Pokemon gets hot in Fukushima
Fukushima to use rare Pokemon to lure tourists back
Japan is planning to use Pokemon Go to lure tourists back to its quake hit regions, including in the radiation affected prefecture of Fukushima.
Officials for four prefectures in Japan have announced they are partnering with the Japanese subsidiary of Niantic, the US company behind the Pokemon Go game.
They hope that creating virtual attractions in the popular location-based game will help draw people back to the natural disaster affected areas.
Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures are located in the north of the country and were heavily impacted by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Kumamoto, located in southern Japan, suffered a series of earthquakes in April this year.
A handout image made available 16 March 2011 by Japanese Fukushima nuclear plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO)
The game is already live in Japan, but players would find extra goodies in the four prefectures under the plan.
Game-makers will add more PokeStops – places where treasured items can be found, and more Pokemon Gyms – locations where people can meet and send their captured monsters into battle.
Officials say they will also place more rare Pokemon in the areas for players to hunt.
Tourism promotions say that less than 10 per cent of Fukushima is affected by radiation exclusion zones, insisting that other areas are safe to visit.
Officials in Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima have also been planning ‘recovery tours’ in which guides take visitors to sites affected by the disasters.
But there are limits.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, TEPCO, reportedly had to request game developers to prevent Pokemon from spawning in radiation affected areas of Fukushima, to avoid drawing players into hazardous areas.
Nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant suffered meltdowns as a result of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and TEPCO says they recently found Pokemon at the site.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/08/12/fukushima-use-rare-pokemon-lure-tourists-back
Does Tohoku’s disaster tourism exploit or educate?
Disaster tourism can be an unsettling descent into voyeurism as visitors ghoulishly gawk at, and photograph, those caught up in catastrophe as if they’re at a petting zoo. The concept has prompted widespread condemnation of insensitive tourists and travel companies exploiting disasters as marketing opportunities.
In the years following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, opponents of disaster tourism have claimed that its economic benefits are overstated while the ethical shortcomings are legion. Advocates counter that the economic benefits can be significant, crucial to regional recovery, and that there are important lessons to be learned.
There is no longer much to gawk at along the Tohoku region’s tsunami-ravaged coast, however, save for some shattered buildings preserved to memorialize the tragedy. Bus companies and hotel operators pocket profits, but they also generate jobs and expose outsiders to a region that has always been a neglected backwater.
Recently I witnessed large buses from one local tour company disgorging dozens of sightseers for snapshots of the skeletal disaster management center and the derelict Takano Kaikan hall in Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture. These tourists are spending money in local shops and restaurants in a remote place that has poor transport links and is in the middle of a noisy, messy all-encompassing rebuilding phase. What used to be the center of town is now a vast construction site dominated by giant berms of earth that will raise the town by about five meters.
I met a young man from Osaka who came as a volunteer and then decided to remain in the area. He pointed out that for devastated local businesses, disaster tourism is a welcome lifeline. Elsewhere, a big-screen TV in a hotel lobby features a 3-D video of the tsunami that allows guests to don special glasses and watch the unfolding tragedy. I suppose this could be educational, but the prevailing holiday atmosphere dissuaded me.
Denunciation of disaster tourism in Tohoku is grounded in sympathy for the victims and concerns that devastation is an unseemly attraction, but Australia National University’s Simon Avenell, author of “Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement,” says he is not a purist in this regard.
“From a financial perspective, I’m generally supportive of disaster tourism, certainly because it brings people and some money into the region, but also because it offers local people a chance to express their feelings directly (rather than mediated through the press or TV),” he says. “As time goes by, 3/11 becomes less and less of a news item, so tourism can be at least a small communication pipeline for locals.”
However, Avenell also has qualms about the potential for masking serious unresolved issues, because by promoting a sense of normalization “it could actually hamper fundamental change (and) … its political benefits might be limited or even deleterious in the long run.”
The infamous Kyushu port of Minamata, which put mercury poisoning on the global radar in the 1970s, is now perhaps the most visited sight for school excursions by Kyushu students after Nagasaki’s atomic bomb park and museum. Chris McMorran, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at the National University of Singapore, takes his students there. He says tourism officials from Tohoku visited Minamata to learn about the city’s educational disaster tourism initiatives and the role of kataribe (storytellers) in them.
“Using an itinerary to create an opening for reflection and communication has long fit the learning objectives of overseas field learning experiences,” he says. There are “packages that continue to attract visitors to Tohoku who want to hear from survivors, witness the destruction and (most intriguingly to me) view (and photograph) disaster monuments. In some areas, there are also new shopping areas targeted at tourists, which feature locally handmade products and restaurants. It seems like these places are actively promoted by locals trying to start businesses in the absence of other major economic activity.”
McMorran posits there are phases in Tohoku’s disaster tourism.
“First, through volunteerism, then volunteer tourism (or ‘voluntourism’), then disaster (recovery/support) tourism. It’s a fascinating evolution that has effectively controlled the potential anarchy of large-scale volunteerism and steered it into consumption (via tourism and the purchase of local goods) as the preferred disaster recovery response from citizens.”
The media has played a significant role in this latter phase. Philip Seaton, a professor of modern Japanese studies at Hokkaido University, has studied the role “contents tourism” has played in Tohoku’s recovery. This is where television shows, films and anime promote an area specifically by featuring it.
Producers chose sites “in disaster zones in the hope that the ‘contents tourism’ induced by popular culture would help in the more general economic revitalization efforts of disaster areas,” Seaton says. Prime examples include NHK dramas “Yae no Sakura,” set in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, and “Amachan,” set in Kuji, Iwate Prefecture. It is estimated that the latter generated ¥30 billion in economic benefits for Tohoku as fans of the series flocked to the gorgeous coastal location to sample local delicacies from the show.
It is also clear that a variety of organizations, ranging from religious and education institutions to NPOs and activist groups, are conducting study tours in the region that are explicitly educational. As I wrote two weeks ago, the ruins of Okawa Elementary School in Miyagi Prefecture are now a site for school tours that aim to improve disaster preparation. Universities are also running study tours in the region.
Hiroko Aihara, a journalist with Japan Perspective News, notes that the Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation has issued guidelines for responsible disaster tourism but remains ambivalent over “dark tourism,” which involves places associated with death and suffering. She is concerned about a lingering radiation risk in Fukushima and worries that if tours don’t involve local residents and the evacuees, visitors might get a skewed impression that downplays the nuclear disaster — which could be “converted to political propaganda by the ‘nuclear village,’” she says, referring to pro-nuclear interests. She also cautions that schools and teachers should disclose information about the dangers of radiation exposure near the stricken nuclear plant and suggests bringing individual measurement devices. If properly led, she agrees that educational tours can be beneficial, but she is not in favor of mere casual observation.
Fukushima Prefecture is sponsoring trips to Namie, an abandoned town just 9 kilometers away from Tepco’s three nuclear meltdowns, that convey a powerful message to visitors about the hubris of nuclear safety — underscored by the continuing ban on overnight stays. Nearby Futaba, however, has taken down the iconic pro-nuclear energy welcome sign that spanned the entryway into that ghost town because it had become a favored photo op for tourists. Some disgruntled locals feel it should have been preserved for posterity to help future generations learn the lessons of Fukushima, but abashed town officials claim the aging sign had become a safety hazard. At least that’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/02/27/commentary/tohokus-disaster-tourism-exploit-educate/#.VtLKBubzN_l
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