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FROM THE FOUNDER
Money earned from what makes this country worth visiting, kept in the hands of the people who live here. What TABICO stands by.
I love the country I grew up in. The smell of a good dashi broth, streets that change their face with the season, and people who will pour a stranger a drink the first time they meet. The more I travelled abroad, the more I realised how little of that is ordinary. What stays with you after a trip is rarely the scenery — it is the people.
More people visit Japan every year now. Towns have their energy back, and travellers are reaching places that were never on the map. I think that is straightforwardly good news.
But two things have come to worry me in this work.
The first is how much simply never gets explained. How to behave at a shrine, how to eat, where a camera is welcome and where it is not. Again and again I have seen people get it wrong with no ill intent at all — nobody had told them. If those of us doing the guiding stay quiet, this country’s culture becomes mere backdrop. Explaining it is part of the job, not an extra.
The second is that the money visitors bring does not stay where it was earned. In towns that should have been busier than ever, shops I knew have closed and been replaced by operators with deeper pockets. I have watched it happen repeatedly. Money made from what makes Japan worth visiting should find its way back to the people who made it that way. On this I will not bend.
So TABICO never became a company that only guides. We meet visitors face to face on our tours, and we also work with the businesses who receive them — running their social media, helping them get ready to host. The neighbourhood restaurant, the workshop, the small inn, each able to welcome guests from abroad under their own steam. Only when it reaches that far does any of it mean anything.
That the people who come here leave thinking of Japan as somewhere to return to. And that the lives of the people who welcomed them are a little better for it. Only with both does this work hold together.
TABICO LLC, Founder
Mihiro Ono
YOUTUBE
The things I mentioned above — the ones nobody has told anyone — I talk about on a channel called "Ono in Japan", in English. How to change money, how to use a Suica, what you need at immigration. All of it is what I would want to know before flying in.
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