Pandemic brings unexpected support for Hong Kong tour company dedicated to revitalising Japan’s countryside
- Walk Japan’s mission to reinvigorate farmland areas and rural communities in Kyushu has received greater interest from Japanese since the pandemic began
- Walks that pass through the area include a chance to sit down in a farmhouse for tea with local people, who are happy to talk about lives spent working the land
There sometimes seems to be a certain cynicism about tour companies’ involvement in charity. The news that a tiny proportion of your payment will go towards funding a school, or preserving an endangered creature, can seem little more than an incentive to make that final click on the button marked “book now”. Self-indulgence suddenly feels like benevolence.
But some companies genuinely recognise a debt to the communities and environments in which they work, and without which they would have no business. So they either consciously plan development and conservation projects, or simply become absorbed into their communities in an almost accidental way, through a sort of osmotic sympathy.
One example is Hong Kong-based Walk Japan, whose two-legged tours through the Japanese countryside may have come to a temporary halt but whose Community Project continues to follow the rhythm of the seasons.
Walk Japan’s investment in the Japanese countryside didn’t arise out of any business model, says former tour guide and now company CEO Paul Christie.