same time a project to produce public signposts written in Hangul was launched. This impressed the Korean people in Japan, attracting many of them to the region. Small as it is with no hotel accommodation, the village also promotes home-stay programs to accept the visiting Korean students, together with a variety of events in which they participate. Another project which started recently is the Hangul School, where 20 or so fifth and sixth grader elementary school students study Hangul together.
Along with these international exchange programs, we are also promoting a campaign for beautiful towns. In 1985 Shiga Prefecture formulated an agreement to "Act to preserve and develop the landscape of hometowns in Shiga," in which the local communities each pledge to clean up their region and make it more attractive, promoting its own special features. Amenomori was the first community to sign this agreement and indeed it has become a beautiful village, now visited by 30,000 people every year who come to study its success. We call this grass-roots level diplomacy. The most exciting outcome for us though, is to hear many Korean children commenting "We have been taught at our school that the Japanese people are terrible, but it is not true. My opinion of them has changed since I stayed with a Japanese family."
Here, I would like us to consider the relationship between tourism and the transformation of the community, or in other words, the relationship between international exchange and the revitalization of the community.
In order to transform a community, it is of utmost importance for the local residents themselves to learn about it, that is, to first examine the features and advantages of their own town, then continually improve these elements. The second principle is to examine the weaknesses of, and what is lacking, in the community, then resolve these negative elements, and the third is to make sure the aforementioned efforts continue. These are the three principles I consider most important.
I hold that tourism, whether you accept people from outside or go to see things in different places yourself, provides an occasion for you to think over what you have. If you do not know about yourself, you cannot speak about you to people from the outside world. Taking the outsider's point of view, you will have to know something of him in order to present yourself so that he understands you. After all, the purpose of talking about yourself is not only to convey information about yourself, but also to initiate the offering of information from the other. This is indeed the key to grass-roots diplomacy, therefore it is necessary for us all to welcome the outside world as well as to go and see it for ourselves.
That explains the relationship between tourism and the transformation of the community. However, we in Shiga Prefecture are still far from such a level of interaction. We have not yet achieved the first principle for the transformation of a city, that is, to recognize our own resources and then take advantage of them. Although all the communities have various good facilities, some of which are new, we have not yet been able to fully exploit them. Therefore, the first task is to acknowledge our resources. Although their commercialization is a problem which will need careful consideration, it is a matter which must be dealt with if we are determined to market them.
In connection with this, let me tell you about study tours to libraries. Shiga Prefecture has seen the construction of many libraries, one after another, since 1980. To take in such a variety of libraries, many library tours have been organized, but no one regards these as having tourism value. Also popular in Shiga Prefecture are study tours for officials which teach about the successful transformation of Shiga, although, even though they are an important part of the industry, I doubt that most people regard such tours in the same way as, say, visits to Nagahama's Black Wall, i.e., they are not recognized as tourism products. Therefore, in order to take advantage of all assets, a working party of experts should be established to research and report on them.
