aitaiJapan

Dear guides,

How are you doing? First of all I have to apologize for my long silence. More than a year has passed since our last newsletter. I hope you are all doing well.

aitaiJapan is now well into its second year of existence. With very little marketing, it seems that our webpage has attracted lots of attention.

Unfotunately Mr. Takegoshi, the co-founder and his wife left our association in the summer of 2005. At the moment we have yet to find someone to take over his responsibilities. The organizational and administrational tasks of running the association (such as coordination between guides and visitors, integration of new guides, advertising, statistics, homepage-updates etc.) have been left to me. This is one of the reasons why I have been unable to build on the initial success of aitai Japan. There is still more to be done; I would like to cover more areas in Japan with guides and improve our website. However thanks to Ramon and Patrice I still got some proofreading help and some webpage maintenance.

• Our current situation

Actually we have a total of 48 active guides, supporting guides and supporting members.

Since June 2005 visitors from more than 20 countries of all 5 continents have used our service.

Over 70 guide activities have been performed in the Kansai and Kanto areas.

Nearly all of our guides have been contacted at least once, some as many as 15 times.

Guide reports and visitor reactions show that both visitors as well as guides are very satisfied with the activities. We didn’t even get one single complaint so far.

I would like to thank all our guides who very eagerly send us back their guide reports. Many of the reports contain long comments. Most guides are very enthusiastic about guiding foreign visitors and most guides expressed their motivation to learn and know more about Japan or about their town and its sights and history.

Unfortunately few visitors ever bother to give us a feedback. I would like to ask all guides to kindly remind our visitors that a written feedback – ideally with photos – would be very helpful for a better understanding of visitor needs and also for promoting our service firsthand by posting their feedback on our webpage.

• Guide’s profiles

It seems that guides with very complete and personal profiles and especially with photos are contacted more often than guides with shorter profiles and with less or more common information. One guide for example has been contacted for being a Ramen–lover! It shows that by introducing particular interests, the profile gets more life, something that might appeal to our sometimes very individualistic visitors. Therefore if you wish to be contacted more often, I would like to encourage you to update your profile with more specific details about yourself and set up a photo if you haven’t done so yet. No complaint of violation of privacy has been reported yet, so just give it a try!

• Help needed

We are still in need of help. If you are interested in lending a helping hand in one of the following tasks, we would really appreciate it:

First of all we need someone who occasionally can translate from English into Japanese!!

Furthermore we could need some help for

1. advertising our service to reach more potential visitors
2. advertising to reach more potential guides, especially in areas other than Kansai/ Kanto.
3. negotiating exchange of links and banners with major Japan related website.
4. improvement of our website

• … and last but not least

We are still desperately in need of some small donations for advertising, printing post-cards and flyers, buying stamps, badges, cardholders, etc and a bigger donation for the professional makeover of our homepage.

If anyone can be of any help for one of the above or if anyone wants to give a donation, please contact me at aitaijapan@gmail.com

In the meanwhile I wish you all a happy end of summer and many nice guide opportunities for the year to come.

Thanks to all of you for your great help to our association and for all the joy and good memories you gave to our visitors from around the world.

All my best to you all

Dagmar Franzen

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