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While spring is slowly edging across northern Europe, a tulip festival is already under way in a repro Dutch town in Kyushu, southern Japan. Nearby, holiday-makers bask in the tropical heat of the world's largest indoor beach. Jan Dodd takes a closer look at simulated environments in the country that spawned Tamagochi virtual pets.
I rather wanted to dislike Huis ten Bosch. It wouldn't have been difficult. Here I was, a European in search of Japan's enigmatic soul, heading for a fake Dutch town billed as one of Asia's largest theme parks. A few days previously I'd been overloading on the glorious temples of Kyoto and Nara, then chilled out in a mountain-top Buddhist retreat. Now I was about to wallow among mock windmills, plastic tulips and twee houses overlooking sanitized canals. Huis ten Bosch, on Japan's southerly Kyushu island, is the most ambitious of several theme parks which opened in the early 1990's. They epitomize the crazy bubble years when the Japanese economy was going stellar, money was cheap and banks were lending like there was no tomorrow. The parks divide into two categories: those replicating destinations round the world - an eclectic bunch including Spain, Canada, Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon and a Western Samoan island, as well as Holland; and a smaller group mimicking nature with their indoor beaches and ski slopes topped with "real" snow. Yet surely Japan, of all places, has enough historical towns and traditions of its own without having to borrow other people's? The country has superb beaches in Okinawa and is no slouch when it comes to snow. And, anyway, why not just hop on a plain or train and experience the real thing? The reason is a mix of fashion, economics and fear. As living standards rose during the affluent 1980s, so the "three sacred treasures" Japanese families formerly aspired to (a fridge, TV and washing machine) were replaced with the "three Vs" - video, villa and vacations abroad. The trouble was that, though the strong yen made foreign travel more affordable, exotic holidays remained beyond the reach of many. And, in any case, a sizeable number of Japanese still regarded "abroad" as a worryingly unpredictable place, plagued with crime, dirt and disease, let alone language problems. The answer was to bring "abroad" to Japan, clean it up, translate it into Japanese and hey presto! To some extent the beaches and ski slopes follow the same rationale. If you've only got a few days holiday each year, as many Japanese still do, you don't want them ruined by fickle weather. Instead, why not create a totally controlled environment where the sun always shines - without that nasty ultra-violet - the sea is always warm and safe, and the snow a perfect powder. The concept caught on and, though they've certainly been hit by the current recession, these parks are still drawing the crowds.
So I was not alone as I traipsed along the platform at Huis ten Bosch Station. My scowl deepened at the turnstiles where I met the first of many "shopping opportunities", but at least the staff weren't wearing clogs and lace caps. Inside, three windmills decorated a low embankment, while in the distance the spitting image of Utrecht's Domtoren stood out against a cloudless sky. There were flower-decked canal boats, bikes and lazy swans. But something was missing. Slowly I realized that there were no advertising hoardings, no brutal loudspeakers and none of the mess of wires that scars modern Japan. To my horror, I began to enjoy myself. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Huis ten Bosch is the attention to detail. Everything has been given the same meticulous treatment, from exact copies of seventeenth-century Dutch harbour-boats to neat rows of houses set at odd angles and faced with irregular, antique-style bricks. Apart from the Domtoren tower, the showpieces are a clone of Gouda's chocolate-box City Hall and a stunning rendition of Queen Beatrix's official residence, the Paleis Huis ten Bosch, or "House in the Forest". Even Dutch visitors are deceived. But there's a lot more to Huis ten Bosch than screwing up your sense of reality. It was the brain-child of a local entrepreneur, partly as a money-spinner, but in the long-term as an experiment in urban living. Eventually Huis ten Bosch will be launched as a fully functioning city that, as far as possible, is environmentally benign. For all its olde worlde facade, the guts of the place are designed for the twenty-first century. It is equipped with the latest in energy-efficient heating and lighting systems, sewage and desalination plants and computerized flood-control. Much of this technology was developed in Japan and has attracted interest from environmentalists and town planners alike. Even the wildlife are impressed: the swans on the canals are here out of choice.
Over on the east coast of Kyushu, near Miyazaki, Seagaia is also playing the environmental card, though to my mind with less success. The resort is fundamentally a huge convention and leisure centre set in 350 hectares of pampered pine forest. However, it's also home to the Ocean Dome, a vast, indoor theme park which attempts to recreate a paradise island. An impeccably white, crushed-stone beach shelves into a clichéd, cobalt-blue, non-saline sea. The water is a constant 28ºC and the air a balmy 30ºC; it's summer all year round in Ocean Dome. The only time the real world is allowed to intrude is when the summer sun is hot enough to open the massive retractable roof. Ocean Dome is certainly impressive technologically, and scores high as a wacky day out - perfect for control-freaks. It's also great on cool winter's day, but I found it less convincing as an alternative take on reality. The most bizarre thing about the place is that it stands a mere stone's throw from a long, deserted stretch of genuine seashore. To check I could still tell the difference, I rolled up my jeans and went for a paddle. Not exactly paradise, but a welcome affirmation that we're still a long way from simulating nature's complexity.
Worlds apart: Japanese gardens Creating alternative realities is nothing new in Japan. Since at least the eighth century Japanese gardeners have been evoking alternative worlds, both real and imagined, in artful arrangements of rocks and water. In place of mundane tropical islands, however, early designers - often monks - chose the cosmic Isle of the Immortals or Amida Buddha's Western Paradise for their theme parks. These mythical lands were expressed as san-sui, or "mountain-water" gardens. They consisted of a large pond ornamented with rock-studded islands in a carefully contrived, "natural" setting. Amida's Paradise was also said to contain magnificent palaces. Few earthly interpretations of the palaces have survived, with the exception of the superb Phoenix Hall at Byôdô-in, near Kyoto; whoever the architects were, they can't have been far off the mark with their diaphanous, water-bound pavilion. Soon Japan's nobility began creating their own, secular gardens. The orchestration of rock and water still mimicked idealized nature, but the lake became a place of pleasure - for boating, poetry contests and moon-viewing parties. Gradually representations of famous beauty spots and scenes from literary masterpieces or ink-paintings were incorporated into the landscape. Mount Fuji, Matsushima's islet-speckled bay and the great sandspit of Amanohashidate were favourite subjects for these precursors of today's Huis ten Bosch.
The fashion for replicating specific scenes reached a peak in the Edo period (1600-1868). By this time plot-sizes has shrunk so much that the pond was reduced to a purely ornamental feature. Instead, the nobility now strolled round gardens made up of a series of tableaux which unfolded as if on a journey or pilgrimage, both increasingly popular pursuits for the privileged few. Probably the most famous stroll-garden is Kumamoto's Suizenji-kôen, on Kyushu. Its theme is famous scenes on the road from Tokyo to Kyoto, though only the grassy cone of Fuji-san is instantly recognizable. Tea gardens, on the other hand, represented an escape from reality. These elaborately understated gardens, the setting for rustic tea-ceremony pavilions, were designed to put participants in the right mood and to intensify aesthetic awareness. Though highly artificial, tea gardens appear absolutely natural, the embodiment of a perfect, simpler world. Paradoxically, the supreme vehicles for escapism were none of these naturalistic gardens, but the austere rock gardens of Zen Buddhism. Here the whole universe was distilled down to a bed of sand and a few judiciously placed rocks representing the essence of being. Zen gardens were designed as aids to meditation, a step on the path to enlightenment - the ultimate reality. © 1999 Rough Guides All Rights Reserved
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