Village resort relives history

ONE of the unusual exhibits at the expo is the Huis ten Bosch Resort near Nagasaki - a little bit of the Netherlands made in Japan.

To make any sense of this it helps to know a little history. Dutch involvement in Nagasaki dates back to around 1600 and the influence is reflected in the city's architecture.

Dutch-Japanese links fascinated Yoshikuni Kamichika, president of the Nagasaki Holland Village Company, when he learned about it on a trip to Europe in 1979.

He combined elements of city planning used by the Dutch with Japanese technology to build the Nagasaki Holland Village. It opened in July 1983 in Seihi, a small town situated on the banks of Omura Bay, 35 kilometres north of Nagasaki.

In 1988, work began on a 152-hectare site. A total of 6,000 metres of canal network was dug and about 400,000 trees and 300,000 flowers planted around buildings. The result was Huis ten Bosch, which, in Dutch, means house in the forest. The Japanese call it the city born from the sea.

Huis ten Bosch is an attempt to recreate the charm and beauty of a 17th century Dutch village.

Historical buildings have been painstakingly copied and even the bricks were imported from the Netherlands.

It is more like a small town than a village.

Located within the resort are four hotels, 69 shops, 58 restaurants, cafe terraces and bars, and 11 museums.

There are also a variety of ways of getting around - bicycles, canal cruisers, taxis and bus.