Like most westerns I was allergic to the sight of Japanese travel groups. I vividly remember local Parisians making fun of them when visiting there one summer back in my student days in the early 80’s. When taking my parents on a sightseeing tour of some famous Kyoto temples in 1984 we all dreaded the sight of tour buses with ‘団体` signs disgorging endless groups of boisterous junior high school students. Our early morning visit to an empty Ginkaku-ji with 45 precious minutes of silent beauty all to ourselves was a memory that my mother cherished all her life.
My first taste of Japanese group travel, and the fun, came when I worked for a printing company in Shizuoka. For the Bōnenkai the president took the whole company for an overnight stay at Hotel Ambia Shofukaku in Yaizu, a local swanky onsen hotel (well swanky for Shizuoka anyway) with 24 hour hot spring baths offering a fantastic view of Suruga Bay and Mt. Fuji from the top of the famous Okuzure cliffs. What’s not to like? Lots of good food, all you can drink and 24 hour onsen with a view. I have great memory of hitting the onsen and getting smashed with our crazy designer who’d lost his front teeth, driver’s license and marriage in a car accident. The company president was wild too: a Hokkaido born passionate Communist party member, one of the student leaders of the Anpo protests with a weakness for kitschy western art (those awful semi impressionist nude ladies in floppy hat paintings who’s artist name escapes me). The company went under a few years after I left. Welcome to Shizuoka.
After becoming a Nichiren Shu priest one of the duties was going on temple member group trips. Part of the job was looking after the temple members, half tour guide, half participant where the schedule was, on the surface, micro managed but full of escape hatches on a 2 day parade of site seeing, visiting temples, drinking beer on the bus, drinking at lunch, drinking more at the dinner banquet, and finally, after the temple members where tuckered out and tucked into their futons, the priests gathering for more drinking into the wee hours with a local group of young female ‘companions’ hired from the local drinking establishments to pour drinks with lively conservation, luring the priests to go out for more drinking at said drinking establishments.
Ask any ryokan or hotel proprietor in Japan and they will inevitably tell you they love Nichiren Shu temple tour groups because of all the boozing. And selling booze is where they make big profits. The love is mostly nostalgic unfortunately because younger generations don’t see the point of belonging to temples, the days of boisterous boozing are mostly gone. Company group tours are also pretty much a thing of the past. Whenever a foreign asset management group gets a foothold in a Japanese company, company tours are always the first expense to get the ax.
Which is a shame. As hokey as group travel may seem, it’s a rare opportunity to enjoy the company of other people in a unique social setting with a timetable and the company paying all expenses. Uncool until you appreciate how cool it can be. And even though the once mighty Japanese tradition is mostly gone in its home country, Taiwanese group travelers still enjoy filling grand old onsen hotels like the famous Kagaya. It’s the kind of place one can only appreciate with a big rowdy group filling an enormous banquet hall with an empty beckoning stage waiting for the silly skits to begin.
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