The Malaysian Insider :: Features

Japan’s quake-hit regions promote disaster tourism

Posted: 19 Nov 2011 07:36 AM PST

Bakery and cake shop "Eclair" serves customers in the tsunami-hit city of Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture after it reopened following the March 11 tsunami and earthquake disaster. — AFP/Relaxnews pic

TOKYO, Nov 19 — Companies and communities in Japan's disaster-stricken northeast are devising schemes to earn a living from their misfortune, eight months after their livelihoods were wiped out by the biggest natural disaster to strike the nation in living memory.

Those efforts received a boost this week when the foreign ministry announced that foreign tourists who visit Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima — the three prefectures worst affected by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami — will not have to pay for a visa from next week. The scheme will run until at least November 2016, the ministry said, and travellers will be required to show transport tickets or proof of their accommodation to be exempt from paying for a tourist visa.

The visas cost ¥3,000 (RM123) for a single entry and ¥6,000 for multiple entries and the scheme is aimed at visitors from countries such as China, Thailand and Malaysia. Travellers from a number of countries are already not required to pay for a tourist visa.

Some 77,000 tourists visited the three prefectures in 2010, but numbers have been significantly lower since March 11, falling 88 per cent in Fukushima and 90 per cent in Iwate during the second quarter.

But people who earned a living from the tourism industry in the affected areas are devising their own schemes to attract visitors.

A group of residents of the port town of Otsuchi, for example, is inviting visitors to stay in their homes and experience fishing and farming in the community. They are also creating a tourism centre to show the history of the town and the damage that the earthquake and tsunami caused, while they also plan to train local guides and produce souvenirs from the town.

Elsewhere, Sanriku Railway Co. started tours of disaster areas as early as May and has so far taken more than 1,000 people through some of the hardest hit parts of Iwate Prefecture. JTB Tohoku Inc. introduced similar tours of Rikuzentakata in October.

Another proposal is to create a Japanese version of Germany's famous Fairytale Road the length of the coast of Iwate Prefecture. The route would take in the key points of the towns of Otsuchi, Kamaichi and Hanamaki — which served as the backdrop for many of the poems and fairy tales that were written by Kenji Miyazawa.

The organisers hope to imitate the route that has been created in Germany to follow the tales of the Brothers Grimm and attract both domestic and foreign visitors. — AFP/Relaxnews

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Swiss museum clinic tries to cure information junkies

Posted: 19 Nov 2011 07:24 AM PST

BERN, Nov 19 — The Libyan war, the Greek debt crisis and the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal have all been rich fodder this year for news junkies — but is today's information overload healthy?

A Swiss clinic has set out to help those who feel overwhelmed by such excess with an unusual exhibition that runs until July 15, 2012 at the Museum for Communication in Bern.

On arrival the visitor walks into a darkened room with 12,000 books lined up on shelves, in an illustration of the sheer amount of information individuals are bombarded with daily.

The Communication Clinic section of the "Attention, communiquer nuit" ("Beware, communication hurts") exhibition in Bern. — AFP/Relaxnews

The exhibition explains that if all the inhabitants of the Earth came together to process all the data released worldwide, they would each have to read about 12,000 books like this a day.

"In principle, communication is important and can be something that gives pleasure, but nowadays there is a flood of information," museum director Jacqueline Strauss told AFP.

She likens it to food. "You can eat too much, you can always eat the same thing (...). That's not good, but if you have a healthy and balanced diet, that is pleasurable and comfortable."

An average person can read a 350-page book in a day if he or she has nothing else to do, according to experts from Bern University who participated in the exhibition.

But the volume of information and communications broadcast and published round the world by Internet, e-mail, telephone, the press, radio and television is estimated in the exhibition to amount to about 7.355 billion gigaoctets — the equivalent of billions of books.

Faced with this surfeit of information, "there are cases where people become ill and there are certain risks, like burnout," said Strauss. But if one takes charge of oneself, 'overload' illness can be avoided.

The Communications Clinic, which she has set up in the exhibition, is meant primarily to "raise awareness".

'Are you stressed out?'

On a television, installed at the entrance to the clinic, a woman warns visitors: "Advertisements pile up in our letter-boxes, spam chokes our e-mail boxes" and "cable companies offer us 200 channels".

"Are you stressed out, overwhelmed, exhausted?" she asks.

If the answer is "yes", the visitor is invited into a "check-up room" where he fills out a questionnaire that will enable the compilation of his or her Personal Communications Index and lead to the offer of suitable treatment.

The visitor is then told by coaches which door they need to go through.

The green door is for those with no problem. The yellow door is for those who are only mildly troubled by the excess of information and mail, and it opens on to a space where the visitor can get counselling on how to sort out his or her e-mails.

For the really "sick", there are two more intensive treatments. The red door opens into the meditation room, also described as "inner light". Comfortably seated on black cushions, the visitor relaxes, a red light forces him to close his eyes and a woman's voice urges him to let go.

The orange room, known as the "balanced formula", offers the visitor a walk in the wild, between wooden walls and on floors of pebbles. Visitors can pick them up, collect them, write on them and listen to the sounds of a flowing stream and of songbirds.

At the end of the tour, an automatic distributor delivers a supposed medicine called "Comucaine".

Packaged in a white box, Comucaine is actually an instruction leaflet which summarises the advice given during the exhibition to help people to de-stress from the information overload.

For those who are really hooked on the news, the clinic offers online support on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/svanbelkom.

But above all, the museum's director stressed, we must not forget that "one is not only a victim, one is also guilty" because "everybody is a producer of information". — AFP/Relaxnews

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Kredit: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com

Sabtu, 19 November 2011

The Malaysian Insider :: Features

The Malaysian Insider :: Features

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