Aburaya Kumahachi

Aburaya Kumahachi made and lost a fortune in rice speculation, spent time in America, and arrived in Beppu at around fifty with a conviction that the town could be sold to the whole country.

What he actually did

He built an inn. Then he did something nobody in Japan was doing: he marketed a place. He organised the hells into a paid circuit with names and stories. He hired boats and then buses. He put women guides who sang on the buses — a format that became standard across Japan and lasted most of a century.

He is credited with introducing the sand bath as an attraction rather than a local habit, and with pushing for the harbour improvements that let steamers dock. He advertised nationally, in an era when towns did not advertise.

He also had "Beppu" painted on the surface of a hell and, by one account, released steam-heated souvenirs and stunts with the enthusiasm of a man who had studied American showmanship and was not embarrassed by it.

The mountain with a word on it

Kumahachi is associated with the enormous characters spelled out on Mount Takasaki and with the monkey park there, and with the idea that a town could have a logo before the word existed.

Whether every story about him is exactly true is a separate question — he was a self-promoter and the stories are part of the promotion. But the shape of Japanese domestic tourism, the bus tour with commentary, the packaged circuit of named sights, the town that advertises itself, is substantially his.

What is left

The hells circuit is his. The sand bath as something visitors do is his. The bus tours are his. And Beppu's slightly unembarrassed, slightly kitsch confidence — the town has a monkey mountain, an aquarium, a tower and a hell called Blood Pond, and offers all of them without irony — is entirely his.