Thank you very much for the introduction. I am Ohkuchi, Director of Planning Division of Tourism Development Department of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

　Izumisano City I have a strong personal, emotional attachment. About seven years ago I spent three years here at Kansai International Airport; just before the opening of Kansai International Airport I stayed here. And in my experience this is the development of an airport or a whole town, and I witnessed the birth of a new town or a new international airport. And Izumisano City, and looking at Inunaki Mountain, I worked so hard until midnight. And I flew from Tokyo this morning to come here, and from the train I looked at the buildings and Kansai International Airport and Inunaki Mountain, and I witnessed the evolution and survival of the town, which impressed me.

　If you look at my presentation material, it says "contemporary meaning of community development based upon tourism." This is the big issue, but my message is only one, but I would like to discuss from various aspects but my message is just a single one, which means that our life is very short and our life is limited and restricted, that I think is the only one life that we can enjoy, therefore, we would like to live with richness and affluence and various benefits. Materialistically we can be rich, we can live in a bigger house, but can we satisfy ourselves just with the materialistic achievements? That is my starting point.

　It says that socially environment is rapidly changing. I think you have the similar experience yourself, but among yourself, for instance, there are some people from the Yokohama City Government. I was born in Yokohama myself, but when I was born, at that time Yokohama was different. There are some remaining areas from those days; you can hear the frog from this season, from June to July, there are some countryside and the rice paddies and the fields. People go to Tokyo, commuting to there, and also there are people coming from the War, veterans, and they are elderly. Therefore, this is a mixture of various scenes, and Yokohama used to be active in that regard. And the chorus of frogs, and walking through rice paddies and going up the mountains and the hills, I had a lot of experiences there. But recently, those sceneries are rare; coming from Tokyo, Yokohama and Hiratsuka, I think everything is homogeneous today, so uniform. When I go to Hakata, my hometown, in my childhood the language was different, dialects were different. What I speak was different from the way other people speak, and food was different, for instance, the taste of miso-soup was different, and roof tiles were different from area to area. So you can see the transition on the Shinkansen, bullet train. I was half asleep thinking about those things. But everything is similar; roof tops, roof tiles, and shapes of the houses, they have lost unique features and personality, therefore, due to the rapid changes, actually everything has become homogeneous.

　Mass production, mass consumption and liberal competition are today's key words, and we think these are good. Free competition, although we think is good, but it should be supported by mental, psychological balance, otherwise, we will cause misunderstanding and mistakes. We may make a serious mistake if you are not supported by mental foundation. For instance, we try to save time, and various innovations and discovery have been done for the purpose of saving time. For instance, trains, the steam engines were discovered, and also we have automobiles and airplanes. These transportation modalities have made a great advancement in order to save time. We can live in a convenient lifestyle; refrigerators and washing machines, they are convenient, too. But convenience in that sense has come to the extreme. And if you go to the other spectrum, then it will make our facial expression homogeneous; our facial expression will be the same for everybody, and we feel the sense of crisis, and people have started to have this kind of sense of crisis of homogeneity.

　Secondly, my topic is as to be born and aging and getting sick and die. For instance, in my hometown there are elderly suffering from tuberculosis, and they are suffering at home, those who are bed-ridden, who are there in the community, and family members take care of those sick people, and we were very close to those people who were taking care of old people who were sick. When they pass away, they become cold, we touch the cold body of the grandfather, and we are looking at the dying people, and at the funeral we go through the funeral ceremony and we have marched in procession to the graveyard. Therefore we share the pains of suffering and dying process. But this cycle of being born and getting older and sick and die, these are the essential elements of the life, but actually these are hidden from the surface of the city, for instance, when you get sick, we are hospitalized to the institutions, medical institutions, and then after you pass away, graveyard is far away, not in your community, but there is the modern graveyard in the suburb. This is quite different from the old days. In the past I went to Chugoku-chiho area and I traveled myself going through these farmlands and various areas. And next to their garden, just next to that, there was the well -developed graveyard in the community, living together with the community, and the rice paddies and fields were adjacent to those graveyards in the past. But this kind of scene has been lost from the surface of Japan.

　Why I am talking about this on a topic of tourism, you may question. But through the life cycle we are supported by various emotions, getting angry and happy and sad, and cry, and enjoy, these are the various emotions. Joy is at the height of your emotion and sadness is at the bottom of your emotion, and there is the amplitude between these two, and the bigger the amplitude, your life is richer. For instance, sorrow: sorrow will contribute to the richness of your life. Even though you are sad, therefore the scene which contain all of the lifecycle elements, born, getting old and getting sick and die, is a very important one. If you go to Paris, a graveyard is part of the tourist attraction. It is rather strange to say this, but various people visit this; visitors will go to the graves and tombstones of famous people and people try to find a particular person's tombstone. I went to Lisbon with my family, and it just happened that there were a lot of slopes in Lisbon and we were so tired and exhausted, and when we looked up, there was an old lady waving hand to us. And I and family members, four people together, we waved back to the old lady. And I vividly remember the scene clearly in my heart and mind. And we had sardine and we had delicacy of the local area, but the most vivid impression that I had was the waving hand of the old lady and our experience of waving back. And I think that is the highlight of our travel in Lisbon together with my family members.

　So when I think of that, tourism is not USJ, Disneyland, Paris, London, Osaka, Seoul, Sydney. These are the big cities, and there are attractiveness and charms of big cities and metropolitans areas; that's true. But there are subtle elements of your experience during your travel and they become bigger and bigger in your mind and heart. I think that is the essence of travel and visiting other areas that you don't know.

　So if you refer to No. 3, human beings and tourism, eventually all of us will die, and therefore while we are alive, we would like to look into the universe of myself, we would like to expand the universe of myself as an individual. That I think will lead up to the richness of your life. For instance, we are curious what is there across and beyond the mountain, and people try to find what's over there, something new, something different from your local area. And if you find it, you will be surprised to see a new scene, and also meeting new people will expand your universe. So even in the contemporary age, the very basics and the essence is nothing different from the past. We are trying to find something new and something different from ourselves.

　Now, talking about expressing your ego and your self, I work at my Office, and there is one interesting office in my Department. Youths today, although we are trying to express ourselves but actually new people coming into the Department, young people, behave the same way, and they wear the same clothes and they talk in the same way, and they are all the same, young people. Therefore I became to think of that we have to express ourselves and we try to expose our ego. Our lifetime is limited, risking misunderstandings, if you have a unique feature as a personality, you will become a very interesting person, not an average person. You will not just say "yes" to everything. This is lacking stimulation. It's better to have some arguments, and for instance, different perspectives and different ideas can be presented by somebody who is very interesting, and I know something new by exposing to those arguments which are contrary to my own, and that satisfies my curiosity. This can be said to areas as well as people. I stayed three years in Osaka, and for the first time I lived in Kansai area. And after living in this area, I realized that there are some deep sides of Kansai region. But including Kansai dialects, Kansai is a place where something completely different is going on in comparison with Tokyo area; different food, different gags, different way of talking and different food and everything. And that makes my life richer. Osaka and Kansai area is a kind of area trying to express the personal ego. And that I think is a very interesting thing, and also very important for the whole Japan. Therefore, expressing the ego and exposing ourselves is very important not only for humans but for communities. Community can develop itself like the one which can express its own ego and personality.

　I am going to touch upon some subject of the main issue. We have got tea ceremony, calligraphy, flower arrangement, and other cultures, and we call it somehow the training of self. So it is the aesthetics-based training of self. So that sense of aesthetics understanding should be deep-rooted in our self, and it is often achieved through various steps of training. In Judo and flower arrangement, what is important? You have to learn for the first time, and you can assimilate patterns. But finally eventually, you should emancipate your sense and your understanding from those patterns. You should achieve certain degree of freedom in which you can exercise your own personality. So in those different cultures, in Japan there are some common features, as I have described, and in various towns and cities there ought to be patterns which we can discover. We live in a human society; time is one dimension in which we make our living, and things change over time. But after the filtration through time and other dimensions, there ought to be something still remaining, which is the very core of our tradition and history. That has been passed on from the distant past. And the language or dialect is one of them. Kansai dialect is unique; those who have lived in this region for a long time have conserved this dialect from the parents' generation or even before the parents' generation. And those who speak Kansai dialect are always conscious of that pattern? I don't think so. They have assimilated a pattern, and within the freedom which they acquired in the end, they can exercise their dialect very freely at their discretion. So there is freedom as well as pattern, and that can be identified in various towns. And because of the freedom those cities and towns open to tourists and also people outside. And those are very important. We need to develop patterns, and also we should achieve freedom.

　The next point is harmonization between modern technology and this tourism-based community development. We live in the IT age. In my office most people have cellular phones. They have PC in their work, and e -mail is essential for handling a lot of communication. Functions of human beings are supported by various apparatus; such as buses and cars and airplanes are giving us a function for going to distant places very quickly at a short time. And now the human brain is the focus point, and it is now supported by Internet. In a way we can say that Internet is our function of the brain, speaking and thinking and also hearing. So using the external apparatus of Internet we can now develop ourselves and we can communicate outside. There are both pros and cons in these convenient tools which you can handle. And we have to define the way in which we use them. In that case, the modern technology and tourism should be both understood, and harmonization is very important. And there are some good case studies in which this harmony is well exercised.

　Before coming to this office I was involved with a Japanese island-to-island ferry operation. Seven thousand islands altogether in Japan, and 5,000 are inhabited, and about 320 there are the ferry services on a regular basis, therefore, on a daily basis the Main Island and Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa are connected through those ferry services. When people would like to go to those big islands, there are about 325 liners available. But of course, to attract tourists to these distant islands is not an easy task. There is a good example. In one island Internet was facilitated in a local school. In this context, therefore, e-mail was facilitated, and they started e-mail communication with schools in Tokyo, both primary and secondary schools. And in the e-mail children on the islands said: "This is my island. In the summer you can see the starry night every night and the whole sky is shone with thousands of stars. And there is an open berth for people and islanders, we are having a berth to look up the sky, and you can see the shooting stars from time to time." And the e-mail was read by urban students, and they wanted to visit that island and they said that: "I want to go." And the parents heard that. And one summer holiday that island was full with the students and children from urban areas as well as parents. All the hotel accommodations and B&B were filled with them. And there was no tourism industry involved. It was a genuine human-to-human contact which triggered such a development.

　So when things were developed naturally and spontaneously, that human communication was enhanced in such a way. So we call it "en," human to human connectivity or communication. And then, IT might work as a sort of "en" which triggers human to human communication. So, because of the benefits of IT, which was Internet and e-mail in that case, a very ideal communication was developed.

　On the other hand, however, there are some negative sides. Let's look at various aspects of IT. In some cases, IT works in a different way. So maybe one person needs to be isolated from the environment to identify his self, but cellular phones always connect you to somebody in the world, so you are connected to the world all the time. But we are human beings and we need to sometimes present our ego very clearly, which is different from others, and IT will support such an aspiration. Sometimes IT might jeopardize such an ego presentation by individual people.

　The sixth point, the secrecy for the tourism -based community development; "secrecy" I purposely used it, and this term I love it. I talked about Japanese tradition and cultural activities, and in the end you enter the world in which nobody tells you what to do and how. That is the secrecy. But that can be communicated through some sort of telepathy, not through words. Dr. Nishimura is the authority of the community development, but perhaps in the end you might say to community development people in each locality: "You must think about it. What to do and how should be your own idea" So at the end of the day, community development should be the culmination of wisdom among people in that community. There is nothing else. So while taking advantage of various human communication, you can also capitalize on the wisdom which has been transpired and conserved through generations, and you need to think about your ego and also your self presentation as well. But in the final phase you have to have a ground to earth activity in which you try to work out what should be done with your own idea.

　I have been working in this Office for about 25 years, and because of my daily involvement I can understand and sense the atmosphere. Perhaps I am old enough to probe some specific atmosphere in the office. When you are committed to some specific project, the atmosphere in the office is quite different. You can almost touch the atmosphere of the commitment among all the members. How should I describe it? It is not the time or temporal dimension. So the concerted effort and orchestrated effort is in there and that is translated into some specific atmosphere of the representation of all the peoples and their pursuit. So, that can apply to community development, and when there is some project, the town itself looks like a living organism with some volition and also commitment, and some lively atmosphere is presented. You can say that those residents in the community are all lively and also with full of vitality. If you are committed to your work, the office itself is very attractive, and visitors to the office often say that, oh, you have a very impressive office, I can tell you. So as long as community development is supported by certain people who are making a full commitment to that project, that will work.

　In Japan tourism-based community development is now being promoted, and there are success cases and failure cases, and when you observe the success cases in terms of local communities, you can always say that their commitment and also the full aspirations are somewhere and in some method presented almost as a tangible asset in that community.

　I would like to say one more thing before closing. As is the case in our work, the outcome is not always a simple translation of the commitment you have made. So there is no guarantee, in other words. Even though you have made an utmost effort, things might not be so successful. And of course, outcome and successful results are important. But whatever it is, if it is a human conduct, things might fail into failure. That is inevitable. Maybe some people say that: oh, that person was quite unfortunate. Although he made such an effort, his life was not so successful and he is not so happy. That could happen. Maybe some might . say about my life: He made so much effort but he was not so successful. But let me say this. The cosmos, this universe has got more than 5 billion years in history, and maybe that fact, the very fact of me making a commitment should remain somewhere with something you can see. So in the end, the very fact that people made a commitment to the community development through tourism enhancement is the most important thing. So it should be noted that although so much effort might be made and there is no guarantee of the success, perhaps people might not be so happy if I say so, but perhaps I thought it was very important for me to disclose that particular inevitable situation which might happen to your situation.

　So the point is that the result might not be satisfactory, but please remember what I said about that old lady in Lisbon. I was actually in that scene communicating with that lady, and that street corner was there with my family standing in there, that very fact is very meaningful and significant. And in this Izumisano, in one street corner there might be some important, valuable memory which is cherished by somebody. And it is of course a very small, tiny bit in the universe of such a vast expansion, but that street corner should keep glowing forever because of that experience. So the meaning of this tourism can be expanded. For each person there is some universe and for each individual person there is something which is glowing with so much shine and also the glory all over.

　Of course, we should not flatter to tourism, but in the end we might have to make some flattering so that our project can be successful. So it is a very delicate, sensitive balance we have to be very careful about. And I hope that what I have been saying is making some contribution to your perception of this grand issue of tourism-based community development.

　Thank you for your attention.