Yanagawa offers hospitality to foreigners with easy Japanese

February 16, 2018

Fukuoka- Yanagawa, a tourist city in southwestern Japan, is working to offer "omotenashi" hospitality to visitors from abroad with "yasashii," or easy, Japanese that is simple for them to understand.

The efforts of the city in Fukuoka Prefecture have been drawing attention as an effective way to communicate with foreigners, with the number of visitors to Japan seen continuing to rise toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The omotenashi campaign, launched in August 2016 in collaboration with major Japanese advertising agency Dentsu Inc. , mainly targets Taiwanese people, who account for more than half of all foreign visitors to Yanagawa.

According to a survey Dentsu carried out for 1,000 people in Taiwan in 2016, about 40 percent said they can speak some Japanese. Of those who study Japanese, about 60 percent said they want to speak the language while traveling in Japan.

About 150,000 people from abroad annually visit Yanagawa, which has a population of about 67,000, for attractions, including "kawakudari" boat trips in the city's famous canals dug around a now-defunct castle built some 400 years ago.

The Yanagawa city government has created two kinds of badges--one for foreign visitors who want to speak in Japanese and the other for locals who can speak yasashii Japanese. They are available at 200 yen each at souvenir shops and other places.

The city calls on shop clerks and boatmen for the kawakudari trips to actively talk to people wearing the badge for foreigners in simple Japanese.

Such yasashii Japanese should be simple and short sentences that are spoken with clear pronunciation from the beginning to the end and avoid dialects, honorifics and difficult words while concluding with "desu" or "masu," both suffixes showing politeness.

One such simple sentence, for example, is "Tabemasu-ka?" which is used to ask someone whether he or she wants to eat. This is easier to understand than an honorific equivalent, "Meshiagarimasu-ka?"

Recalling the time when a Dentsu official who is from Yanagawa proposed the project, Mitsuya Matsufuji, a municipal official for tourism, said, "It was an eye-opening experience to learn that we can use Japanese (in communicating with foreigners)."

Previously, the city's efforts had focused on increasing the number of languages available on signboards and pamphlets, and arranging interpreters.

The new omotenashi campaign has helped increase repeat foreign travelers to the city. In addition, officials from local communities hosting competition venues for the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan have visited Yanagawa to learn about the campaign and gain clues to attracting visitors from abroad.

The Yanagawa government has invited Japanese-language lecturers to teach local tourist industry people and citizens about yasashii Japanese so as to nurture leaders who will spread the use of sentences easy for foreigners to understand.

"I hope Yanagawa will come to be known as a city where foreign visitors can try to speak in Japanese," Matsufuji said. Jiji Press