Part 2.5. Our local head monk, and package tours
See part 1 for an introduction. My experience as a small tour operator in Japan.
Finding our direction and learning the ropes, continued:
Our unique local head monk
The head monk of Horaijisan (the temple mountain where most of our tours happen) has seen countless rotations of city hall and prefecture public servants. Horaijisan and the area has had tourism as a major industry for centuries, the temple being known for over 1,000 years as a place of healing. Temples have all had ups and downs from trends and political pressure, but like many places, Horaijisan has been in a rapidly increasing decline since the peak of local tourism in the 80s/90/s/2000s. Horaijisan’s temple is the head temple of a group of 2, the other being in Kyoto, looking out over the overtouristed Arashiyama area (known for its bamboo thickets). The head monk and his son (also a monk) spend most of their time there, as the temple is, as expected, much more busy. Almost all visitors to Arashiyama don’t know this, but the bridge across the river was built for the temple they walk past and ignore on their way to the monkey park.
The head monk of Horaijisan is very intelligent, experienced, funny, and blunt. He’s helped us to understand the limitations of working with governments and funding projects, and he’s helped us to understand the changes in tourists both Japanese and foreign. “There’s idiots everywhere” he told us, explaining that people he sees around Arashiyama come to take photos then leave. In the past he occasionally had visitors that would come and show some interest in Buddhism, coming closer to the temple, asking why he has a crystal ball, etc. but those days have seemingly ended. The head monk likes to come to Horajisan when we run experiences there, so he can see the foreign people that are more interested in Buddhism and temples, but he is still sceptical that most tourists will ever show real interest. Initially we thought some of his comments may be a bit extreme, but as our experience grew and we came to know his experience, we found these occasional blunt statements to be helpful.
To use the metaphor from Henry Ford’s mis-attributed 2003 quote, our local head monk can see people wanting a shiny theme park experience in Kyoto (the automobile), and cliche experiences with little authenticity (the original horse). A deeper and traditional experience does exist outside of what these tourists see and want (the faster horse), but he doesn’t see any evidence of many people really wanting that. The theme park side of Kyoto and cliche experiences seem to be enough for most visitors.
Package tours
Early in our journey we thought there could be potential in offering package tours to the area, removing friction (like needing to book accommodation) and letting guests make the most of our connections to local businesses. In the end, it hasn’t made much difference at all, but some of our guests have really appreciated how we can make the most of our local knowledge. For reference, to book transport or accommodation for a tour guest in Japan, someone in the business needs to have the appropriate licence, with levels for region-limited, domestic, and international travel.
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Studying very hard in a short period of time, my wife passed the test and earned her region-limited travel agency licence. Our first hurdle was how to actually register our business with the licence. Registering the licence is handled by the prefecture, and as almost no one passed the test or tried to register the licence for a long time, the prefecture had to train one of their staff (in a very short period of time) to become the case officer for travel agency licences in the area. We were able to register in the end, but it was very strange that the government required someone so local to manage the registration.
As I needed to sell our products in English, and communicate with guests in English, it turned out that I needed to study everything as well. The amount of laws, requirements, details, processes, etc. involved when selling a package tour from Japan is insane. They say that standards are written in blood (in the aviation industry for example), but for Japanese tourism law, the laws read like a hodge-podge of bandaid solutions to counter specific examples of bad business practice in the past. Some make sense, but overall it’s a perfect example of the dangers of design-by-committee combined with knee-jerk regulations. You may think that a licenced travel agent has access to all of these laws they need to follow and may be punished for not following, but you would be wrong!
Infuriatingly, the publicly available laws that inspired one of my best spreadsheet checklist masterpieces to date was only part of the picture. To get “the red book” that contains all of the laws we need to follow, we would need to spend many thousands per year to join an agency group, something that our small operation just doesn’t justify. Working carefully, with carefully worded conversations, we learned the basics of these secret laws from our prefecture rep (who was given the sacred red book).
The friction involved at nearly every stage of a package tour in Japan holds the industry back, making it uncompetitive to offer package tours from Japan, and it explains why many companies do their sales overseas, having local offices make the bookings. Avoiding the need to operate under Japanese tourism law is the smartest move. In fact, many operators overseas and even within Japan choose to ignore the tourism laws, and hardly anything happens in these cases.
For our package tours, we needed to have our website and marketing material, customer booking process (including spreadsheets), and home office checked by the prefecture to make sure it aligned to a sweeping range of sometimes arbitrary laws. Meanwhile, businesses and individuals are offering package tours domestically and from overseas that blatantly break the laws or are run without a licence.
In one case we felt it was necessary to officially report something we’d seen to the prefecture. We were told to call the police to make the report. Calling the police is the only way to report a violation of a specific tourism law that requires subject knowledge to even identify. We gave up.
We still offer package tours to this day, but we run them on-demand when our returning guests request them. Going through the legally required process with new guests is painful for all involved, so we really appreciate how our returning guests tolerate these things we can’t avoid.
In the next part (Part 3)
Notice us! How we tried to get attention in an information-saturated world. Here’s a link.
