Volunteer Tetuya Ito says he volunteered as a tour guide out of sheer concern for his community's tourism industry. Photo courtesy of Pacific Magazine. ISE, Japan (Saipan Tribune), November 13, 2007:
At first glance, Tetuya Ito seems to fall too easily into the stereotype of a world-traveling senior citizen. The trim 64-year-old loves to take photographs. He credits his decades-long marriage to the road trips he took with his wife.
Now retired, he has the time and savings to discover the outside world. Instead, Ito is home helping others discover his world.
This grandfather of two children is one of some 45 senior citizens giving tours around the Grand Shrine of Ise, the largest and most revered Shinto sanctuary in Japan. Ise is a city located in Mie prefecture, about 75 kilometers west of Nagoya.
Born in Ise, Ito says he volunteered as a tour guide out of sheer concern for his community’s tourism industry. “Tourism to Ise is declining,” he says. “I wanted to contribute to bringing it up.”
Ito’s concern is grounded in reality, given the 2,000-year-old history of Ise tourism. Noritake Kanzaki, a specialist in Japanese folklore and a councilor of the Institute for the Culture of Travel, says early Japanese tourists were commoners who used worship at Ise shrine. But they traveled to the shrine as an excuse to get away from the heavy hand of shogunate rule. The sightseeing wasn't a good benefit, too.
Today, the Ise Shrine is still a popular tourist destination (there are actually 123 shrines in the area, though two are the main attractions). It is visited by travelers-both religious and escapist-from Japan and elsewhere in the world.
Ito is a dedicated traveler. Describing himself as “a typical Japanese husband with no interesting hobbies,” he jokes that his wife might have left him, had he not taken her to road trips around Japan. He adds, however, that his overseas visits to Hawaii, Guam, and other countries were on business, so he took them by himself.
Before retiring two years ago, Ito worked in real estate. In this sense, he is different from other volunteer guides. Many of them are former government tourism officers and teachers who are not quite yet ready for retirement. Seventy-four-old Tosio Ohnishi, for example, used to teach college English in Mie prefecture. Ohnishi has been a volunteer guide for three years and is one of the few offering tours in the English language.
To get certified as a tour guide, Ito went through a six-month training program. He was required to learn the history and industry of Ise, observe more experienced guides on the job, and pass a test.
Ito has been a guide for two months, putting in two days a week to his volunteer job. For the price of a meal and transportation, he provides one- to two-hour tours of the accessible parts of the shrine. He has given tours to a bus load of 45 people, as well as a solo traveler.
“It’s a very rewarding job,” says Ito. “I get to meet people from Hokkaido to Okinawa, and I learn about their cultures. The letters of appreciation they send me are invaluable.”
By Agnes E. Donato,
2007 Sasakawa Pacific Island Journalism Fellowship scholar in Japan.
©2006 Saipan Tribune.
