I recently had the privilege of joining a local government study tour to Japan. There were nine attendees, seven from Australia and two of us from New Zealand so I felt honoured to be chosen.
For the majority of the time we were based in Okayama prefecture and had the opportunity to visit community facilities, businesses and rural industry as well as local government centres all with the view of local governance, funding, issues and opportunities.
It is interesting that although there are vast differences in the size of our countries’ populations and the drivers of our economies, the challenges we face are much the same. We both have aging populations and we both need jobs for the unemployed.
Japan’s small towns are declining as their young people leave for the big cities and many social service organisations rely heavily on volunteers or ‘supporters’ as they are called over there. Sound familiar? Unfortunately they don’t have all the answers either.
On the lighter side I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the business names which had obviously been subjected to a literal translation. Just a few examples were the ‘Love Drugs Pharmacy’, ‘The Big Girls Hair Hospital’, ‘Coconut Boys F-arst(sic) Food’ and ‘Dry Nats Wedding Dress Restaurant’. The signage gave us more laughs than the very high tech toilets, but that’s another story.
NB There was no cost to the ratepayer for my trip.
Adrienne Staples
