What do you do when your small, poverty-stricken town where the major industry is coal mining, is headed for financial disaster as the coal mines slowly close down?
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, one town had the answer. They opened the Joban Hawaiian Center in January 1961. It was the first resort facility and theme park to open in Japan and it strove to bring the image of "The Dream Island, Hawaii" to the local people for an admission fee of 350 yen. Aloha shirts and muumuus were an additional 300 yen each.
Utilizing the hot springs from the mines, they were able to grow palm trees and banana trees in a 7,000-meter giant dome, quite exotic for Japan, especially in the north. In the first year, they had 2,000-3,000 visitors on weekdays and 10,000 on Sundays. About 1.2 million visitors came during their first fiscal year.
Now called the Spa Resort Hawaiians, the center has a golf course, spas, and a technical school for flamenco and Polynesian dance. Opened in 1965 by the governor of Fukushima, it cultivates dancers for the stage of the center.
According to the current director of Joban Kosan, Yukio Sakamoto,
Former President [Yutaka] Nakamura traveled to mining countries around the world — including Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States — looking for ideas about new businesses, but he found nothing promising. He made two tours, following almost the same route, but in the end his efforts were nearly in vain. As he made his way back to Japan with a sense of dejection, he stopped in Hawaii to take a rest, where he got a big hint. In an instant, the wonderful spaciousness and warmth of Hawaii and the rhythm of percussion instruments that reminded him of a village shrine festival gave him the idea of creating a Hawaii in Japan using Joban's geothermal heat and hot springs. This is what I was told.Instead of outsourcing and hiring professional dancers, he had a professional dancer train miners' daughters and eventually, whole families would work — at reception, in the restaurants, and in the souvenir shops and on stage. This was part of the "One Mountain, One Family" creed of the Joban management because "if this project does not succeed, there will be no tomorrow for Joban."
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