aitaiJapan

aitaiJapan Newsletter #1 April 2005

How have you been doing recently?
Spring has finally come, the weather is getting sunny and bright. It’s a perfect season for enjoying nature, sight-seeing or doing other outdoor activities.
We hope you have the chance to fully enjoy this beautiful season.

In our first newsletter we would like to give you some information about our association:

With the beginning of the new season aitaiJapan is also preparing to fully enter into service. We started our association in November 2004 with a small team of 3 or 4 volunteer members. These ambitious volunteers set up a nation-wide volunteer service to help foreign tourists traveling in Japan and to give an opportunity to Japanese people to get into contact with people from countries from all over the world.
We wanted this service to be free for everyone, so that even the most cost conscious budget travelers could enjoy.

So far our idea has worked out well.

… about our guides

We are now a group of about 30 volunteer guides, mostly in the Kansai and Kanto areas and with a few in other areas as well.

… about visitors

In total we had requests from visitors from different countries such as America, Australia, Canada, New-Zealand, France, Germany, India, Thailand, Indonesia and many others.

This is very encouraging considering the fact that for the moment we only advertise within Japan.

Unfortunately many request are for areas where we don’t have guides yet, including areas such as Hokkaido or Okinawa.

Some of our guides, especially the Kansai guides, have not been contacted yet for guide activities. This is due to the fact that we have more requests for the Kanto area and, curiously many requests for other areas outside the main tourist spots. Another reason is that many visitors are looking for guides who can guide them on weekdays, but most of our guides are mainly available on Saturdays or Sundays. Kansai guides please do not be disappointed, opportunities will come as the word spreads. We appreciate your patience.

… about our homepage

We announced that our homepage would be operational from April 2005, but there has been a delay due to some unexpected technical problems.

When our homepage will be finally operational, we will be able to advertise more. We hope this will result in an increase in demands for guides. For the moment we beg you to be patient for some, until we can resolve all our problems. We are all volunteers contributing to the association in our (much limited) free time.

… about the new guide selection system

We are thinking about introducing a new guide selection procedure that will be more democratic and fair for our guides and more interesting and easy to use for the visitors.

We will send you more detailed information about this new service very soon.

… guide meeting Kansai

We planned our first meeting for Kansai guides for Sunday, Mai 29 in Osaka.
Details about the time and place will be sent to you very soon.

We hope to meet as many among you as possible to exchange ideas, experiences and to get to know each other.

• Special thanks:

We would like to give our special thanks the following supporting members for all the time and energy they dedicate to help setting up our association:

Patrice Houlet: for setting up the homepage, for many practical advice and encouragements.

Masayoshi Otani: for supporting our association financially and for helping out with useful ideas and promotion.

Ramon Greenner: for his quick and efficient proofreading and useful advice.

Dagmar Franzen and Takashige Takegoshi

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