Tourism by People, Things, and Objects
Thirty-five years ago, in the spring of 1988, a man came to visit me at the office of Chuo Bus' Takikawa Terminal.
I was suddenly greeted with, "Hello, I'm sorry, but I need you to put up this poster. Who from where? I had never seen this face before. Who are you? This was the beginning of my encounter with Hokuryu Town. I had no idea that this bold and wonderful encounter would lead to a new and long relationship between Mr. Sakou and me.
In the fall of 1990, Chuo Bus decided to establish a travel agency (formerly CB Tours) in Sapporo. I was involved from the preparatory office of the company and opened the travel agency the following year (1991), which coincided with the start of Mr. Sako's sales offensive. (Laughs)
I would like you to visit our company in Sapporo from time to time and organize a bus tour to the Hokuryu Town Sunflower Festival.
The town of Hokuryu-cho has been sending visitors every year on sunflower festival-related bus tours and regular sightseeing buses, etc., due to the strong demand for sunflower farms. It is amazing and impressive that the sunflower field, which was initially small in scale, has now become the largest sunflower field in Japan after more than 40 years. After that, he was invited as a lecturer to the Hokuryu-cho Himawari University, where he proposed an exchange between customers and producers from the farming experience and gave a lecture on the system of treating farmers to home-cooked meals for lunch.
In 2015, we decided to start a series of tours with the mayors of towns and villages as bus guides as a new project of our company. 2016, we asked Mayor Sano of Hokuryu-cho to conduct the tour in conjunction with the Soba Festival, and it became a very popular product, and due to customer requests, we have continued the tour since 2017. In addition to a variety of activities such as harvesting Kuro Sengoku soybeans by Yukio Takada and harvesting Hokuryu melons by Yasunori Watanabe, Mayor Sano's guided tours have become very popular and have been fully booked every year.
We were reminded of the importance of "people, things, and goods," and that local acceptance is the most important tourism resource for the success of a trip.
It is necessary to devise attractions that incorporate new ideas to keep visitors from getting tired of the sunflowers, rather than being overawed by the sunflower fields, which are the largest in Japan. For this reason, I think it is important for the future of tourism in Hokuryu Town to relearn the town's pioneering history and train volunteer guides who can explain the history of the town.
We hope that you will deepen exchanges within and outside of the town, valuing the feeling of "looking for what is there" rather than "looking for what is not there".
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