Sightseeing through people, things, and things
Thirty-five years ago, in the spring of 1988 (Showa 63), a man came to visit the Chuo Bus office at Takikawa Terminal.
"Hello, sorry, but I'll put up this poster," he said out of the blue. Who are you from? I'd never seen him before. Who are you? I asked, "I'm Sako from Hokuryu Town." This was the beginning of my encounter with Hokuryu Town. I never imagined that this bold and wonderful encounter would lead to a new and long-lasting relationship between Sako and me.
In the fall of 1990, Chuo Bus decided to open a travel agency (formerly CB Tours) in Sapporo. I was involved in the company's preparations from the beginning, and the travel agency opened the following year (1991). This coincided with the start of Mr. Sakamoto's sales offensive. (laughs)
I would like you to visit our company in Sapporo from time to time and plan a bus tour to the Hokuryu Town Sunflower Festival.
There was a strong demand, and every year we continued to send visitors to Hokuryu Town using buses related to the Sunflower Festival and regular sightseeing buses. What started out as a small-scale sunflower field has now, over 40 years later, become the largest sunflower field in Japan, and it is amazing and moving to see this. After that, I was invited to be a lecturer at Hokuryu Town Sunflower University, where I proposed interactions between visitors and producers through agricultural experiences, and even spoke about a system where visitors could enjoy a feast of home-cooked meals prepared by farmers for lunch.
In 2015, we decided to start a series of tours with town and village mayors as bus guides as a new initiative for our company. In 2016, we asked Mayor Sano of Hokuryu Town to take part in the tour, which was held in conjunction with the Soba Festival. This proved extremely popular, and we also received requests from customers, so we have continued to hold the tour since 2017. In addition to the diverse content of the tour, such as Takada Yukio's Kurosengoku soybean harvesting experience and Watanabe Yasunori's Hokuryu melon harvesting experience, Mayor Sano's excellent guiding skills have proved popular, resulting in the tours being fully booked every year.
I was reminded of how important "people, experiences, and things" are, and that local acceptance is the most important tourism resource for the success of a trip.
From now on, we will need to avoid being overly proud of the sunflower fields, which boast the largest scale in the country, and instead incorporate new ideas into attractions to keep people from getting bored of the sunflowers. For this reason, I think it will be important for tourism in Hokuryu to re-learn the history of the town's development and to focus on training volunteer guides who can explain it.
We hope that you will deepen your interactions with people both within and outside the town by cherishing the spirit of ``searching for what is available'' rather than wishing for what you do not have.
