‘Canadian World’ in Japan Joins Ranks of Failed Tourist Ventures
By Tim Hornyak
About 600 miles north of Tokyo, at the end of an almost forgotten motorway that cuts through blue foothills and red pines, stands a sign that makes locals cringe: Welcome to Canadian World.
Here, in the remote heart of Japan’s volcanic Hokkaido island, is a perfect reproduction of Green Gables, the 19th-century Canadian homestead made famous by children’s author L.M. Montgomery.
It should be an idyllic place, a celebration of Japan’s unlikely yet enduring love affair with Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables novels. But the paint is peeling and the town is silent and surrounded by acres of weeds. Gone are the lavender fields and the tourists who once came to live out their fantasies. Canadian World is a ghost town — a soured dream that once represented the best hopes of the declining mining town of Ashibetsu.
Before it opened, local planners dispatched architects to study the original Green Gables house on Prince Edward Island that inspired Montgomery’s tales. They went, came back, and reproduced Anne’s world here in the middle of nowhere. There’s a post office, a school, and a quiet hilltop chapel where fans of Anne were once married and left commemorative hand-prints under the steeple. The last set dates from a decade ago.
For visitors, it is one of Japan’s oddest tourist destinations, especially for Canadians. “It seems to me it’s kind of too off the beaten track to really attract people,” says Blake Morgan Young, an Albertan who teaches at a Hokkaido university, and who is touring the park with his wife, Mitsuko. “The park is kind of run down. We went into the post office and the front step sags under your foot.”
Locals, too, are struck by the incongruities. “You go there and you can’t help but wonder how they could have done something so dumb,” says stationery-shop owner Tadashi Ishioka. “It was impossible from the beginning to try to reproduce Canada, and it came to such a miserable end.”
Sadly, Canadian World is not alone. Japan’s addiction to boondoggle construction projects and tourism ventures has littered the land with extravagant German worlds, Danish worlds, Spanish worlds, even a Wild West world. Nearly one-fifth of amusement parks here have collapsed since 1997, the biggest being Nagasaki’s Dutch village, Huis Ten Bosch, which is now negotiating a rescue package after accumulating debts of ¥229 billion ($2.1 billion) up to February 2003.
Canadian World’s backers, though, demanded a hefty closure penalty from Ashibetsu, so it remains open, sucking up maintenance money while the city repays the ¥5.2 billion of construction costs. Meanwhile, sentimental piano music floats through the crisp air as a lone gardener plants flowers. In one guestbook entry, a Sapporo girl laments: “Please get back the energy you used to have.”
This community used to have strength. After World War II, Ashibetsu was a leading coal producer, fueling Japan’s reconstruction boom. Founded by settlers in 1893, the city grew to a population of 76,000 by 1958. But then Japanese-mined coal gave way to oil and cheaper imported coal, sealing Ashibetsu’s fate. The mines closed, and barely 20,000 people live here now.
“The only people left in this community are really ancient,” says Misu Burns, a Canadian who once played the part of Anne at the park. “Ashibetsu is a dying city that’s full of relics of the mining industry, old mines and all of the houses that have been abandoned, and the remnants of their attempts to rejuvenate it with tourism.” One of those is a museum featuring a nostalgic recreation of the mining town complete with chatting holographic citizens.
With the population and tax base shrinking, health-care costs eating up the budget and Tokyo cutting subsidies, Ashibetsu seems fated to continue its steady decline. By the time the loans on Canadian World are repaid, there may be little left here save the holographic ghosts, telling stories about their lives with no one to listen.
Originally published in Far Eastern Economic Review. See the article at Wall Street Journal
