Terrie's Take 804 (Tourism Edition) -- When Disaster Tourism May Be Acceptable

Mon May 18 00:06:35 JST 2015

* * * * * * * * TERRIE'S (TOURISM) TAKE - BY TERRIE LLOYD * * * * * *
A bi-weekly focused look at the tourism sector in Japan, by Terrie 
Lloyd, a long-term technology and media entrepreneur living in Japan. 
(http://www.terrielloyd.com)

Tourism Sector Edition Sunday, May 17, 2015, Issue No. 804

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+++ When Disaster Tourism May Be Acceptable

Our travel website, www.japantravel.com, gets lots of requests from 
groups abroad asking questions about how to make arrangements in Japan. 
It's pretty obvious that there is a shortage of good English-speaking 
ground operators here who get the basics of what overseas travel agents 
want: choice and flexibility, reasonable but not necessarily rock-bottom 
pricing, and patience when plans change. So it's an interesting time of 
learning for us.

We were assisting one asian school group with lists of museums and 
attractions in the Hakone area when the news came through that Mount 
Hakone is in danger of erupting. It's understandable that the media is 
hyperventilating about this, given the tragic deaths of dozens of hikers 
on Mount Ontake in October last year. The fact is, though, that if 
Hakoneyama did erupt, not only do we already know to stay away from the 
immediate area, the eruption itself would also be "broadcast" well in 
advance -- as the place is bristling with scientists and 
instrumentation. Predicting eruptions is certainly not infallible yet, 
but swarms of localized tell-tale high-frequency earthquakes gives 
everyone a fairly good base to work from.

Furthermore, people don't realize that despite their awesome power, 
volcanoes generally create a limited threat zone around them. For the 
smaller eruptions common in Japan, you are going to be safe from most 
projectiles when 2-5 kilometers from the ejection point, and with an 
abundance of caution, 15-20 kilometers is considered safe for 
habitation. The threat zone of course depends a lot on the local 
topography and lava flow.

A good guide to threat zones around a volcano can be found here: 
http://bit.ly/1PNIXrW

So while the school group wanted to see attractions that are a 
relatively safe distance from Mt. Hakone, they have of course canceled 
their trip for that leg. No point in making parents nervous, although 
the students could have had an awesome experience... :-)

[Continued below...]

--------- Help Us Test New No-Network Maps App ------------

Japan Travel is getting ready to launch its first iPhone app, which will 
be a No-Network mapping tool. The tool lets foreign tourists use their 
smart phones to prepare Google-like maps and find their way around Japan 
without having a local network connection. Testing will require you to 
download the application (you will need an iPhone) and to use it next 
time you go out for a walk. Estimated test time and reporting back any 
bugs will be about 30 minutes. For testers who are pre-registered on 
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in from the test. We are hoping to have about 100 people test the 
application, so please help us if you can.

To register as a tester, send an email to info at metroworks.co.jp. To 
register for Japan Travel, go to: http://en.japantravel.com/join
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This got us thinking: since Japan is never going to be free of danger 
from natural disasters, how can we get tourists to embrace the 
opportunity to "experience" nature, rather than be scared by it? And so 
we started researching disaster tourism.

In the Tourism Dictionary, "Disaster Tourism" is defined as travel 
undertaken for the purpose of visiting the scene of a natural disaster, 
usually with a connotation of voyeurism. This definition pretty much 
sums up society's negative view of those who travel to see fires, 
floods, landslides, eruptions, and earthquakes. Considering the 
logistical and privacy impact that a throng of rubberneckers can have on 
a disaster site, we'd have to agree -- if there's been a disaster, stay 
away -- for the first few days at least.

However, the 2011 Tohoku disaster raises some interesting questions for 
us, about the disaster tourism that happened in the weeks and years 
after the event. Firstly, when does the presence of tourists in a 
disaster-hit area become desirable again, and secondly, just what 
comprises a tourist?

Let's take the second point first. What is a tourist? When the Tohoku 
disaster occurred, and on witnessing the long lines of people at Narita 
airport looking to flee Japan, we naturally thought that inbound 
foreigner travel to Japan would drop dramatically. However, several 
months later as we commiserated with an airline CEO, we were surprised 
to hear him say that business was not so bad. He pointed out that in the 
months after March 2011, many foreigners and overseas-based Japanese 
came to Japan to try to help out. In fact, the Foreign Ministry said 
that by April 4, just 3 weeks later, over 1,000 rescue workers from 20 
countries and regions had been dispatched to Japan. Add to those 
official groups the tens of thousands of volunteers (Japanese and 
foreign), it is pretty clear that there were probably more foreign 
"tourists" in Tohoku post 3/11 than there had ever been previously.

Those people all had to eat, stay somewhere, buy clothes as they got 
dirty clearing the devastated areas, and avail themselves of all the 
other services needed to support a community. So while they were there 
to assist recovery from a terrible tragedy, their presence also meant 
income for the locals. And if some of them were there from curiosity, so 
long as they mixed it with humanitarian actions, no one seems to have 
minded. Wielding a shovel and bucket is certainly a lot more socially 
acceptable than simple rubbernecking.

And that brings us to the first point, as to when is tourism too close 
to a disaster event to be undesirable? The case of Matsushima Bay is an 
interesting example.

A view of Matsushima Bay is here: http://bit.ly/1HkX9Xp

The bay is a magnet for tourists and thanks to its unique geography came 
out relatively undamaged from the tsunami. Its tourist flow did, 
however, suffer from fears of radiation as well as Tokyo residents' 
respect for people to have privacy as they pulled their lives back 
together again. As a result, tourism dropped 75% in the May-June period 
after the quake, and even a year later the numbers were still down 40%. 
The financial consequences were significant, causing not only hotels and 
tour operators to suffer, but also the "food chain" of suppliers to the 
hospitality industry, including local farmers, foresters, fishermen, 
stores, restaurants, etc.

Kyuichiro Sato, President of the Matsushima Tourism Association made the 
case in 2013 that tourism nonetheless played an important part in the 
recovery of businesses in the area and that the whole community is 
grateful for it. In Matsushima's case, the tourism came in two distinct 
waves. Firstly the volunteers who showed on March 19th (a Saturday, when 
people could be away from their jobs), hundreds of them, including a 
group of Canadians who'd hitchhiked up from Tokyo. These volunteers 
joined in with the local monks and started scrubbing the area free of 
the thick black mud covering everything. By early April, most of the mud 
had been removed, and work began on restoring actual commercial 
facilities. By the end of July, just four months after 3/11, 95% of 
souvenir shops, hotels, and other facilities had been rebuilt.

The second wave of tourists came between Golden Week and summer. Were 
they there because they wanted to show support for the locals, or 
because they wanted to see how bad the damage had been? Does it matter? 
The fact is that without their money and traffic, the Matsushima economy 
would be struggling even more than it has, and the transition from 
devastation to business-as-usual is testimony to the benefit of tourism 
to a disaster-hit location.

So disaster tourism is probably desirable so long as it's handled 
respectfully and in a managed way. And if so, then possibly Japan should 
actually encourage it -- since there will always be another disaster 
just around the corner. Yes, it's a radical idea, but think of it as 
planned financial assistance to targeted areas that need it. Helper-type 
tourists would be looked after by a specialist travel agency, similar to 
how JTB manages special interest sports events. This agency would make 
future operations by government a lot easier by pre-training its 
clients, and preparing the logistics that they would need.Then 
separately the money-toting gawker-type tourists would only be allowed 
in 6-8 weeks after the event, when the local economy has recovered 
sufficiently to be able to actually service and earn income from them.

You have to admit, volcano tourism in particular would make for some 
really cool T-shirts. I can just imagine one with the vivid colors of a 
pyroclastic flow, stating: "I survived Mount Hakone in 2015"

...The information janitors/

------------------ ICA Event - May 21st -------------------

Speaker: Rochelle Kopp - Managing Principal of Japan Intercultural 
Consulting
Title: "Managing Across Cultures"

Details: Complete event details at http://www.icajapan.jp/

Date: Thursday, May 21st, 2015
Time: 6:30 Doors open, Buffet Dinner included and Cash Bar
Cost: 4,000 yen (members), 6,000 yen (non-members) Open to all. No sign 
ups at the door!!!!!!!
RSVP: By 5pm on Monday 18th May 2015. Venue is The Foreign 
Correspondents' Club of Japan.
http://www.fccj.or.jp/about/access.html
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Written by: Terrie Lloyd (terrie.lloyd at japaninc.com)

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