aitaiJapan

Dear guides,

May the New Year bring you happiness!

Aitaijapan has survived a whole year without any complications in 2009. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude for your kind hospitality towards our foreign guests.

In 2009, there were approximately 70 guide requests, with visitors from Europe (U.K, Italy, Spain, France, etc), the USA, Canada, Australia, and Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, China, etc ). Most of the guide requests were for Tokyo, then next to Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka. Many visitors visited Hida Takayama and Shirakawa-Go after Tokyo, and then they visited Hiroshima after the Kansai area last year. Unfortunately, we do not have any guides in these areas yet, so please let me know if you have any friends or acquaintances who may be interested in being guides for these areas.

The most wonderful news of 2009 was that our website aitaijapan.com was published in a travel column in the New York Times last June. Although it was a small article, it was an extremely pleasant surprise for us. In addition, we had a great number of requests from individuals from the USA throughout summer. I regard that it must have been owed to your kind hospitality attitudes.

Furthermore, I have uploaded the member’s communication site SNS http://aitaijapan.so-netsns.jp/ as a way for us to communicate and know each other better. I encourage that all members use this site as a tool to communicate frankly with one another, and to discuss any issues or ideas about aitaijapan. I absolutely wish our website, aitaijapan.com to establish itself on the world wide web more than ever and feel that we can do so with the help from your comments and suggestions.

Finally, please don’t forget to ask to send the visitor’s comments handout to your customers, and also please send in your guide reports after each tour.

I hope that 2010 will greet you all with warm encounters and rich experiences through aitaijapan.

With kind regards,

Yoshiko Nakakura
Aitaijapan.com coordinator

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Dear guides,

A Happy New Year to you all!

Since I took over this website at the end of 2007, it has survived a whole year without any complications. Thus, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude for your kind hospitality towards our foreign guests.

There were approximately 60 guide requests in 2008. Unfortunately, since the end of last year we have been suffering from a world wide economic recession – a declining dollar, anxiety concerning the political instabilities in the Middle East, and so forth I truly hope that these taxing circumstances will gradually be resolved and that we will be able to create more guide opportunities than the previous year.

May 2009 greet you all with warm encounters and rich experiences through aitaijapan.

Aitaijapan.com coordinator Yoshiko Nakakura

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Dear guides,

A Happy New Year.

I am Yoshiko Nakakura, the second successive web-master of aitaijapan. It has been one month since I took over the role from Ms Dagmar who was the founder of this association. In the middle of November, the website was temporally interrupted by its migration, but it has already started again smoothly.

When I announced this website’s renewal and ask all guides for responses, I got just one notice of withdrawal and a few emails which couldn’t be sent. Almost all the guides accepted this situation and agreed to continue their guide activities. I felt really relieved and grateful. As a web-master, I would like to cover the organization and administration tasks of running the association as much as possible. However there are still more things to be done. I thank all guides in advance for help, not only for your guide activities but also any kind of suggestions or advice for improving this website.

I wish you all happiness and get a lot of nice guide opportunities this year.

• Announcement

I have set up a new page “Visitor’s Comment” the aitaijapan web page. This page will help to make getting visitor’s feedback easier. Please ask all visitors to send their comments through this page after you guide them. Their voice will be a great aid for improving our website in the future.

• To Kinki Guides

I would like to meet with you and have a frank exchange of view about our website in the near future. Please contact me and send me your opinion at any time.

I wish you all happiness and prosperity.

Best wishes,
aitaijapan web-master Yoshiko Nakakura

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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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Dear guides,

Let’s start with the good news:

Our homepage has finally gone into service!!

Since the beginning of June 2005 visitors can now choose their favorite guides directly from our website after consulting freely our guide’s profiles.
The service seems to work well. In less than three weeks we received guide requests from a variety of countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany, Danmark, the U.K. and the U.S.

A total of 12 guides have already been contacted through our system, several among them numerous times.

• Advertising our service

To make our service even better known we started advertising on major Japan related web-pages. Important websites such as www.japan-guide.com and
www.japan-zone.com have accepted to exchange links and banners. We also have an ad running in the google sponsored link section.

We are now contacting other tourism related services to support each other mutually. But this is just a beginning. We are working hard to make our service more public and more easily usable, and to improve the design, lay-out, information and services on our web-page.

• Guides profiles

Currently we have a total of 22 guide profiles available in our guide’s profile section.

However several of our registered guides have not contacted us back to set up their profiles. We highly encourage all of you to send us your guide’s profile information form to get your profile displayed on our website and to get the chance to be chosen as a guide.

Guides can choose anonymity regarding photo, name, job, town or age. Main information to be given is about area, interests, language and availability.
Guides don’t need to display any email address or personal data. All incoming requests are first checked by aitaiJapan before being forwarded to the respective guide.

• Accept or decline guide requests

Guides can choose to answer or not to the guide request. If a guide is not available for a guide activity he/she can choose to ignore the guide request or to send directly an email to the visitor to decline politely. In case a guide decides to answer to the visitor all further arrangements should be done exclusively between the visitors and the guide. aitaiJapan can not do all the communications between the guides and the visitors.

However if you have a doubt, question or problem feel free contact us at any time!

• Guide report

We would like to remind you not to forget to send us the guide report after each guide activity for our statistics (to get the permission for the registration of our association at the ward office). Information can be kept to a minimum, but we urgently ask you to send us back the report. You can download the form on　www.aitaijapan.com/guides/forms

• Special services

When entering our web-site you will notice a button called “special services” on the upper menu. Guides can use this section to propose more organized and more defined activities.

Three activities are available for the moment:

• Help for electronics shopping
• “Yuka dinner” by the Kamogawa in Kyoto
• One-day-trip to Arashiyama.

The Arashiyama trip proves particularly popular, as visitors seem to find some interests in visiting spots outside the main tourist attractions inside the town. Also visitors seem to appreciate to have their visit organized in advance.

This section is free to all of our members, including to those who don’t want to display their profile.

To improve the efficiency of our association, we want to encourage you to set up your own special service. Anything you would like to show or to teach to tourists, anything YOU love particularly about Japan. This can be a visit of a famous tourist spot or something more unusual such as visiting a kendo performance or climbing Fuji-san.

You can for example offer a home visit or even a home-stay, a Karaoke tour, a tour into food sections of big department stores which are very fascinating for foreigners, a cooking class, a tea ceremony demonstration, an Ikebana or Kimono wearing class. You can suggest a trip to the country side, a visit to your friend’s house, a visit to a pottery village or interesting restaurants in town.

You can show tourists around shopping malls or bring them to a popular kaiten sushi.
You can help out with souvenir or arts shopping or negotiating prices at the local flea market.

There is no limit to your imagination.

Once you have described your activity (evt. with photo), we will set up your service on our website. Once again you can choose to stay anonymous and you don’t need to display private information, such as your email address. Also you can choose to ignore a guide request if you don’t want to do the guide activity. Please contact us if you need help or if you have questions.

We appreciate very much your contribution to make our service more popular and attractive.

• Help needed

We are also still desperately looking for supporting members or just people who can help out a little with their ideas or active help.

The most time consuming and at the same time the most important task to make our service run is advertising.

There are especially three areas in which we greatly need help:

• advertising our service to reach visitors
• advertising our service to find more guides, especially in areas outside the main tourist spots.
• negotiating exchange of links/banners with major Japan related websites.

Advertising can be done by flyers and leaflets in hotels, information centers, youth hostels, community centers, international houses etc., but the main part of advertising goes through the Internet. We need people who can simply renew ads once a week or once a month or who can help to find out advertising possibilities.
Simple suggestions for advertising opportunities are also useful. Any help is very much welcome.

Also suggestions of interesting links are very welcome. Just send us the web address of interesting websites related to Japan. To get some inspiration, have a look at our link list. www.aitaijapan.com/japan It is still very small. You can help us to make it richer!

Please also check the supporting member’s section on our homepage to get some ideas where help is needed www.aitaijapan.com/guides/supporting_members

Finally all suggestions to improve our website and our service are highly appreciated.

• Divers:

We had our first guide meeting in Osaka on Mai 29th. 12 members joined the meeting with a little Izakaya-party later in the evening.

We wish you a happy summer with lots of great guide opportunities.

Hope to hear from you soon

Dagmar Franzen and Takashige Takegoshi

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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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