"Sitting on a hill just 28 miles from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is one of Japan's most peculiar and popular tourist destinations."
When it opened in 1961, Joban Hawaiian Center was the country's first-ever theme park. It thrilled the hard-working post-war generation with a fantasy of palm trees, hot springs and hula girls dancing in grass skirts.
In the five decades since, it has only grown in popularity, changing its name to Spa Resort Hawaiians and drawing 3.8m hotel guests last year and a further 1.5m day trippers to its giant tropical dome, filled with water slides and a giant pirate ship. Before the resort opened, Iwaki was a grim coal-mining town and the site of the Sendai No.1 POW camp during the Second World War where 252 British prisoners were sent to work in the mines, and where at least 22 of them died.
Today, however, the Spa Resort Hawaiians is closed for business, and in the shadow of the nuclear emergency at Daiichi, it is unclear whether it can ever attract hordes of tourists again. Builders are busy working on a new six-storey hotel, but no one knows if it will ever hold any guests.
"No one here is blind to the impact of what has happened at the nuclear plant will have on the local area," said one security guard outside the gates. "We have reached the lowest of the low. It cannot get any worse. But we cannot think negatively or we would have to give up. We have chosen to be positive," he said. A spokesman for the resort simply said that repairing the damage the earthquake did to the pipes that funnel the area's natural hot springs into the pools would cost "several hundred million yen", and that he was worried that fearful Japanese may never come back to Fukushima.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
0 comments:
Post a Comment