The concept of interactive experience-based tourism born during my first stay on Sado Island。

Born in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and held from 2020 to 2022, Local Craft Market was a great learning experience for us at TRUNK DESIGN. However,
underlying this venture was an interactive experience-based tourism project conceived in 2019 – LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN. 

In January 2019, invited by Tetsuya Sawada of Mitemo Co., Ltd., I visited Sado Island for the first time. We stayed at a traditional house in the remote seaside village of Mushizaki. In front of us stretched the magnificent sea over which the sun would set. On the dining table were tempura of wild vegetables foraged from the nearby mountains and fresh seafood caught in the sea before us. The heartfelt hospitality of local people and the abundant blessings of nature in Japan’s many regions offer a richness of life we cannot experience in the city.

On Sado Island, I also met makers of traditional crafts such as bamboo work and Mumyoi ware. While traveling across Japan and Taiwan to meet various craftspeople, I realized that the time spent sharing food and drink with them has always been an incomparable luxury. I wondered if we could find a way to work together with locals, who truly understand their cultural history and crafts, to offer visitors a more enriching experience not found in standard tourist guidebooks. The vague notion I had carried for some time became a clear commitment during our trip to Sado Island.

Scenes from our visit to Sado Island in 2019

Mumyoi ware from Sado Island

On the last day of our stay on Sado Island, Mr. Sawada and I went to bathe at the hot springs and had a deep discussion about how we could create a platform for craft tourism; where people can visit makers all over Japan. We realized we needed three types of players to establish such tourism:
① craftspeople
② local tour curators who can create content related to the region’s history, culture and craftsmanship
③guides who can also act as guesthouse hosts and interpreters. If these three types of players could be cultivated in each region, the tours would become attractive to overseas tourists with strong intellectual curiosity. This is the framework we envisioned for LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN.

Starting to build local craft tourism teams in the first 5 regions

However, before we could bring life to our vision, Japan and the world were hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. With no chance to travel, we worked hard to launch and operate Local Craft Market, an online platform connecting makers and consumers across Japan. Local Craft Market was able to launch quickly because the craft tourism concept had been conceived already in the previous year.

Looking ahead to a post-COVID era, in 2021 Mr. Sawada from Mitemo applied for funding from the Japan Tourism Agency for a craft tourism project idea under the name “LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN Executive Committee.” His successful grant application was a testament to our success in running Local Craft Market, and our strategic framework for attracting overseas tourists.

We decided to kick off this tourism project with five local crafts: Mumyoi ware (Sado Island, Niigata), Kiso lacquerware (Kiso Hirasawa, Nagano), Orin (Uji, Kyoto), Yoshino forestry (Yoshino, Nara) and Denim (Fukuyama, Hiroshima). We chose these five regions as we already had good relationships with local makers and producers in each. With these local makers at the heart of the project, we started working on building teams to welcome overseas tourists. We spent about six months preparing for this and had numerous online discussions covering various topics, from how to create tours to how to welcome visitors. At the same time, TRUNK DESIGN traveled around each region, filming and producing promotional movies.

Definitions of ‘Craft’ and ‘Journey’ proposed by LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN

During the planning phase for LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN, we refined and rearticulated our definitions for ‘craft’ and ‘journey’ and shared them with the members of each region to foster a mutual understanding.
For example,「Craft」   :
①   provides a legacy of a region’s unique attributes for the future
②　is somthing created by the hand 
③　is something that is present in our daily lives

And a「Journey」:
①　takes you deep into the origins of a craft, traveling further than any guidebook
②  will take you to meet and spend time with local people
③  connects the past, the present and the future, and invites you to embrace the moment 1/365

The official LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN website (available in English and Japanese) features travel plans that have been developed in each region based on these commitments.

Confidence gained from our launch in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore

The inaugural launch of LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN was in January 2022. As it was still difficult to travel abroad, TRUNK DESIGN asked for the support of our retailers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, holding online events simultaneously in all three countries.

The aim was to inspire participants from each country to say, “I want to explore Japan once the pandemic ends!” As each retailer had a physical store, we sent them crafts from our five regions to exhibit and sell, promoting LOCAL CRAFT JAPAN. During these exhibition events, we connected live with guides in the five regions across Japan who gave virtual crafts tours, enabling visitors to freely explore craftsmanship in each area. They also gave a 10-minute presentation on their area’s charms and unique essence.

Visitors were excited to experience the ‘real Japan’ online; a virtual experience featuring “Haptic VR,” developed by Associate Professor Yoshihiro Tanaka of Nagoya Institute of Technology was particularly popular. This technology enables tactile sensations felt by craftspeople during their making process to be shared with others. For example, vibrations experienced by foresters in Yashino, Nara Prefecture, through a chainsaw when felling cedar were digitized and transmitted to a remote sensor at our event in Taiwan; participants were able to experience the same tactile sensations as the foresters by touching a Yoshino cedar transducer. 

Yoshino cedar is used as a sensor and linked to video images to create a realistic experience of the craftspeople’s handiwork

Our experiences with Local Craft Market influenced our decision to incorporate these types of online experiments. This platform served as an “Anywhere Door” to the craft production regions precisely because of its online capabilities. Going forward, rather than being stuck with the mindset that online tools have limitations, I strongly wish to harness the differences between face-to-face and online communication in a positive way.

(Continued in Part 2)